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Today I Learned @lemmy.world

Sjmarf @sh.itjust.works

6mo ago

TIL that the “S” in “Harry S. Truman” isn’t an abbreviation. His middle name was just “S”.

en.wikipedia.org

Harry S. Truman - Wikipedia

93 comments

There's also Ulysses S. Grant. The "S" was apparently just a mistake on his enrollment at West Point. His birth name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. He tried to switch his first and middle names, but ended up with the initials USG instead of UHG.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ulysses-S-Grant
- And then there's the odd case of "Thomas a Becket." Thomas Beket was never called Thomas a Becket in his lifetime. He apparently went by many names, one of which was "Beket," but never "a Becket."
  https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2023/research/thomas-a-becket-study/
  
  Is this the genesis of British "humour"? Thomas, a Becket, even got the name in the time of Shakespeare.
  Waiting for somebody to eviscerate me over British history, cause all I know is Monty Python.
  
  Yeah, that's just odd. 'A' isn't something you'd find before a surname as part of the name, unlike 'd' or 'o' etc.

Homer Jay Simpson Or Homer J. Simpson
If his name is S why is there a period... like an abbreviation.
- People are used to adding periods so they just add it in.
  Source: My middle name is a letter.
  
  Y?
  
  I have a family member whose middle name is a letter. A friend of mine has two family members that only have initials for their first name (one was named for the other). When the older joined the army they just gave him a name that fit the initials and that went on all his official paperwork.
- Came here for this!
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbw3L3Lu1R4
- Because sometimes they insist on abbreviating. It is just a stupid abbreviation.

I had a friend like this in college. His name was AJ. That's it. Just the letters.
Everyone in the department spent ages trying to guess what it stood for. I managed to glance his ID when we got lunch together once. His name was just AJ. There weren't even periods marking it as an abbreviation.
Still haven't told anyone though
- Assuming those are in sequence, sucks to be the middle kid
  
  Names only an ancient roman could appreciate.
- Reminds me of the character BJ in MASH. Named after his parents, Bea and Jay
  
  That was a fun episode. I love MASH. We need a good anti-war show like that today.
- Did you call him Aj or A.J?
- Now I want to name a kid Ay-Jay.

S and a dot apparently.
- Have an old friend/colleague with the last name Oh, share the same first name, so at work we would always say, John S., John D, John O type of deal, for some reaosn it would keep me wondering if we were really saying Oh or O. For him. (John isn't really the first name, just an example)
- S and a dot is just for when you want to abbreviate the S by adding an additional character.
  
  That was the whole pun wasn't it?

My grandpa's name was Larry. I had always assumed it was short for Lawrence. I just found out recently like 8 years after he died that it wasn't even short for that. Apparently my illiterate great grandparents wanted to name him Larrington (which I'm 90% sure isn't even a first name in the lexicon). Apparently my great grandmother wanted him to grow up to be Larrington the Lawyer. My guess is that was a name of a local law firm she had heard of something because it definitely sounds like a surname that you would hear on a law office advert, (i.e. call Larrington and Mitchell). Turns out they couldn't spell Larrington and just decided to name him Larry for short. So his fucking birth certificate has a nickname on it for a name he wasn't even born as. My mind was fucking blown hearing this.
- My dad's name was the shortened version of a longer name and he said teachers in the prestigious British high school he went to (he went on scholarship, he wasn't rich himself) continually insisted that his name must be the longer version no matter what he tried.
  He was also told, "children at this school go to Oxford or Cambridge" by his headmaster when he asked for a letter of recommendation when applying to Sheffield. He got into Sheffield anyway. Eventually got a PhD. Fuck that guy.

That also reminds me of this one public speaker back in 30 A.D. Jesus H Christ. Apparently the H is just an H. Who woulda thought.
- I thought H stood for Harold. As in, "our father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name..."
  
  Lano and Woodley fan by any chance?
- Pretty sure it's Jesus H Roosevelt Christ
  
  You forgot his baptismal name. It’s Jesus H Roosevelt Mary Christ

J Moore, the Moore in the wildly used Boyer-Moore string search algorithm, has a first name of a single letter, J. It's not an abbreviation.
- Moore enjoys rock climbing.[6]
  This might be the most concise paragraph I've ever seen on Wikipedia!

I used to work with a guy that was from China. He only had a first in a last name. He was going to college here and the college required everyone to have a middle initial as part of their login. They just used his last initial as his middle initial.
- Wait does everyone there have a middle name? I'm Dutch and I don't have a middle name. I figured that was quite common also in the English speaking world
  
  My grandfather and father dont have a middle name.
  Both Sicilian (Father born in the U.S though)
  
  I don’t have either. Maybe it’s a murican thing
  
  He's the only person I've known here in almost 50 years without a middle name. It's quite possible other people haven't had a middle name but it's never come up.
  
  I have two. You can borrow one for a while.
  
  The famous poet Edgar Poe also didn't have a middle name
  
  Not that I'm aware of Gerry F. Flap.
- Is a middle name mandatory for you?
  
  What else would your mom call you when she's pissed off?
  
  I don't know that it's absolutely mandatory but it's definitely pervasive.
  
  I think so, when immigrants get IDs in the US I believe they choose/are given a middle name
- I knew that middle names are common in the US but I didn't know it's so deep in the culture
  
  One of those things that’s just normal so we don’t talk about it I guess.
- I've usually seen NMN used for no middle name.
- Poor Alex Song (A.S.S.)

A friend in high school had a middle name of "J"
- Gifs that end too soon.
  
  This is exactly where my brain went.
- My father's middle name is J. Just the letter. His father's name was JQ, just the letters.

Hairy Ass

Monkey D. Luffy type shit

I'd tell people my middle name was "S" too if I were a boy middlenamed Sue. How do you do?!
- Better kill that son-of-a-bitch who named ya that.
  
  Just don't underestimate them... I hear they "kick like a mule" and "bite like a crocodile"

Harry "Cool S" Truman

Back in the 90’s I worked for a guy whose first name is “H”.
- Pronounced as Aitch or Haitch?
  
  Haitch
- I knew an H Jay.

/s
- I was going for the Harrys Truman, but this is much better.

What a coincidence. I never knew this despite my penchant for useless trivia but just yesterday at an airport I overheard some high school kids asking each other trivial pursuit questions and this was one. The next day: this post. Uncanny.

I'm skeptical. This could be true, or AI generated nonsense. It does link to a source, but I can't verify the source.
- This is the reference. It's a dotgov.
  
  To be fair to the person above, that's actually the source given for how Truman wrote his own name, not for the S not standing for anything. The reference for that is number 8, which is a book rather than a website. That said, the one you linked does back up the S not standing for anything anyway
- You can’t trust a historian’s biography or his official museum‽ Don’t trust TechSpot’s exaggerated headlines.
  
  “I do my own research” is a short walk away from “I trust only my own sources”

93 comments