Whenever I uncover the middle name of a friend, lover, and yes, maybe even Joe Biden, I feel closer to them. “Even though for 99 percent of us, it’s just an odd vestige of what our parents were thinking about at the time.” “It’s like getting a glimpse inside somebody’s house,” Wattenberg said. But on a personal level, getting to know someone’s middle name can feel quite intimate. ![]() Sure, it’s tough to draw symbolism from the parochial “Diane” Hillary Clinton’s parents chose for her. I basically want to make it disappear, because it doesn’t have any meaning or serve and purpose.” “ ‘Well, guess we gotta give the kid a middle name.’ My middle name is Ann. “ Donald John Trump or Elizabeth Ann Warren,” Satran explained. According to Pamela Redmond Satran, co-creator of the website Nameberry “connective middle names” started right around the Baby Boom. The blue-blood allure of a third name eventually trickled down to the masses. “Many families in the 20th century felt that middle names are superfluous letters on a birth certificate that are rarely used,” Suzanne said. The concept emerged around the 19th century as a way to highlight advantageous family connections. Those who did not have a rich Grandma Doris or distantly-related Roosevelt to garner inheritance money from saw no reason to bestow a middle name upon their children. “The idea that we just choose a middle name is pretty recent.” “If you look back, the founding fathers didn’t have middle names,” Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Name Wizard, said. “It is generally accepted that parents wished to ensure their children carried the name of a saint along with a given name, and from this practice arose middle names.”Īt first, middle names did not land in America. “Historians will tell you that people with multiple names were found in Ancient Rome, but the practice disappeared for centuries until resurrected in Europe,” Sherri Suzanne, founder of the baby name consulting company My Name for Life, told The Daily Beast. “It is generally accepted that parents wished to ensure their children carried the name of a saint along with a given name, and from this practice arose middle names” Donald Trump was born to Frederick Christ Trump, who gave his son the more inscrutable middle name of John. There’s Hugh John Mungo Grant, Richard Tiffany Gere, Quincy Delight Jones, Ben Geza Affleck, Matt Paige Damon, and Kevin Norwood Bacon. Celebrities who spent the better part of this century naming their kids things like Apple and North West have also inherited eyebrow-raising ones themselves. But that man perhaps did not want to become New York City's bitchiest theater critic, and so we have the more blue collar-friendly "Mitch."ĭistinctive middle names are not just the domain of Washington. Mitch McConnell was actually born Addison Mitchell McConnell. Then there are those who eschew their first names for their middle ones, like Willard Mitt Romney or Thomas Woodrow Wilson. (It immediately reminded me of a deli sandwich.) And that’s Colorado Senator Michael Farrand Bennet to you.įor reasons I will never quite understand, a man whose birth certificate gracefully reads Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg chooses to just go by Pete. Michael Bloomberg’s is “Rubens,” which my very cultured editor reminded me could be a chi-chi nod to the Baroque painter. I audibly gasped the first time I learned Robert Mueller’s middle name was Swan. But he isn’t the only civil servant whose name might make you double-take. We can’t guarantee that.”Ī fancy, Francophile name might go against the bootstrapping image Biden has curated over his 50-plus years out politicking, so it makes sense he might want to keep it on the down low. Allegedly the Robinettes came over with Lafayette and never went home. “It’s my grandmother Biden’s maiden name,” he said. Back when certain individuals took issue with Obama’s “Hussein” moniker, New York magazine dug up C-SPAN footage of Biden explaining his own. Wait a second, wait a second.This was news to me, but not news itself. ![]() As Biden explained it on C- SPAN a couple of years ago: ![]() It also sounds like some kind of miniature bird, or maybe a doo-wop backup singer. ![]() What the hell is that, even? It’s a little feminine, obviously. But now the ticket is weighed down by a second, probably worse middle name: Robinette. By now, we’re all aware that Obama is graced with the, er, politically uncooperative middle name of Hussein. One area in which Biden definitely doesn’t help, though: middle names. It’s widely acknowledged that Barack Obama chose Joe Biden as his running mate to balance out the ticket in his areas of weakness - national security, for example, or appeal to the female, blue collar, or smart-aleck voting blocks.
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