James Earl Jones once traveled across the US and used his legendary Darth Vader voice to talk to truck drivers on his CB radio. It freaked them out so much that he had to stop doing it. Source
A while ago, for fun, I started doing some reading on some of the stranger naming choices made by the Puritans between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. (Yes, for fun. I am a dork.) Here are a few of my favourites:
A Sussex jury roll from the 1600s includes the names Accepted Trevor, Redeemed Compton, Kill-Sin Pimple, Fly-Fornication Richardson, Search-The-Scriptures Moreton, The-Peace-Of-God Knight, Stand-Fast-On-High Stringer, The-Gift-of-God Stringer, and Fight-The-Good-Fight-Of-Faith White, Obediencia Cruttenden, Called Lower, Hope-For Bending, More-Fruit Flower and Meek Brewer. Some other wonderful Sussex names around this time include Safely-on-High Snat, Mortifie Hicks and the marvellously-named Humiliation Scratcher. And let’s not forget Be-Stedfast Elyarde, Faint-not Dighurst, Hew-Agag-in-pieces Robinson, Swear-not-at-all Ireton and Obadiah-bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-in-irons Needham.
Here’s another good naming method: There was a tradition among some Puritan villagers of opening the Bible and selecting the first name their eyes landed upon, which led to some interesting christenings. One poor child was landed with the name Ramoth-Gilead as a result of this method, reportedly leading a rather bemused parson to ask, “Boy or girl, eh?” There’s some evidence that certain parents, whose reading was perhaps not the best, would simply open the Bible and choose a word at random – hence the existence in Connecticut of Maybe Barnes and a girl by the rather unfortunate name of Notwithstanding Griswold. One child in England was christened Sirs, the parents insisting that it was a Scripture name and citing as proof the passage “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” Another Puritan named his dog Moreover after the Gospel passage “Moreover the dog came and licked his sores.”
Yet another story tells of a priest who was befuddled when a woman informed him that her child was to be name “Axe-her”. “What name?” he spluttered. “Axe-her,” repeated another woman. After much discussion he discovered that the women were referred to Achsah, the daughter of Caleb. This may also explain the existence of an Axar Starrs in Stockport – the daughter, appropriately, of one Caleb Starrs. The name Axar remained popular in Devonshire for some time.
A little boy called John wound up with an unfortunate bonus name due to his godparent’s strong accent and a misunderstanding at the baptismal font. “What name?” the priest asked, to which the godparent replied, “John honly.” The priest dutifully went on to declare, “John Honly, I baptise thee…”
Thomas and Elizabeth Pegden, residents of Kent during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, named their first four sons after the four evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. When Elizabeth gave birth to a fifth son in 1795, they decided to continue this theme by naming him after the next book of the New Testament, and thus he was christened Acts-of-the-Apostles Pegden. According to one source, his nickname was Actsy, “for the Vicar of Boughton has heard a parishioner speak of her uncle Actsy Pegden.” An older relative bore the name Pontius Pilate Pegden.
In the late 1800s, a Thurstonville man named his four sons Love-well, Do-well,Die-well and Fare-well Sykes. Around the same time, another boy, being the younger sibling of sisters Faith and Hope, was given the name And Charity.
Another fellow, rather bemusingly, named his son Judas-not-Iscariot.
Zachary Crofton, died 1672, clearly scoured the Scriptures in order to find names for his children. His five sons were called Zachary, Zareton, Zephaniah,Zelophehad and – presumably after all alliterative possibilities had been exhausted – John.
The Presbyterian clergy were fond of foisting on illegitimate children names reflective of the sins of their parents – names like Helpless, Repent, Repentance,Forsaken, Fly-fornication.
Among many other excellent Puritan names, there was also:
Abstinence
Abuse-not
Continent
Creature (a unisex name, apparently!)
Do-good
Experience
Fear-not
God-helpe
Hate-evil
Increased
Job-rakt-out-of-the-asshes
Joye-in-sorrow
Lament
Learn-wysdome
Magnify
More-fruit
More-triale
Muche-merceye
No-merit
Obey
Original
Preserved
Refrayne
Renewed
Safe-on-Highe
Silence
Sin-deny
Sorry-for-sin
Thanks
The-Lord-is-near
Unfeigned
What-God-will
All of these are trumped, however, by a Puritan girl who, when asked for her Christian name, replied, “Through-Much-Tribulation-We-Enter-The-Kingdom-Of-Heaven, but for short they call me Tribby.”
This is great and I’d just like to add that a member of Oliver Cromwell’s government was named Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damnéd Barbon.
Amazing.
Discworld is real!
Oh god, I’ve never seen so much money in my bank account..
And I can’t touch it (it’s needed for the new loan)
I’m not comfortable having so much in my primary account. Moving it as soon as it clears.
the original xbox 360 model come with a fatal error that within a year of use, it will most likely DIE. and this wasn’t one xbox or a few, it was EVERY SINGLE ONE PRODUCED.
shit was so bad that microsoft had to extended the warranty on these things by another year or two. it was only solved when they introduced the xbox 360 slim.
The literal solution was to wrap the motherfucking thing in a towel, like I fuck you not
What did the towel do?
The towel overheated the console to the point where the system is like, “I need to work harder to not break” and it pseudo resets the Red Ring of Death to where you can play with it a little while longer. Which is all you really needed at that time while waiting for Microsoft to send you a new one. I’m sure others can explain it better than I can, but that’s the gist of it
there are little pieces of metal that connect the circuit board components together. they are “soldered” together. 360s had shitty soldering. overheating literally remelted/reflowed the solder so that the connections would work again. you got equivalent results from removing the circuit board and putting it in a reflow oven
You know it’s funny I’ve had my xbox 360 for more than 4 years and it hasn’t crashed, even though it’s fallen over and been carried around multiple times.
The comment about it not being fixed until the slim came out is hyperbole. The problem was well and truly fixed by then, this was only a big issue with the early units, later manufacturing runs solved it.
