Language desk
< April 3	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 5 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 4

Use of 'junior', 'III' etc in US names

Guess this is as much a humanities question as a language one, but as that desk is locked, here we go. I've noticed that it seems pretty common in the US for sons to have the same name as their father, leading to the common forms John Doe, John Doe junior, John Doe III etc. Outside of royalty, this is rarely seen in the Europe (use as a second name is fairly common though). Any ideas where this difference came from? 131.251.254.154 (talk) 15:09, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

This page notes that the practice dates to Colonial America, where local records would use "Junior" and "Senior" to distinguish between two people with the same name (not necessarily father and son) in the same jurisdiction in official records. Over time, this practice got applied in families only to refer to father and son. The British at around the same time developed the use of "The Younger" and "The Elder" (i.e. William Pitt the Elder and William Pitt the Younger.) Since Junior and Senior at the time was only used in Colonial America, the practice continued in America, whereas it hadn't in Britain, because it never got established there. --Jayron 32 15:20, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Looking it up in a dictionary suggests that using junior to indicate the younger of two people with the same name goes back to Middle English - which is usually defined as before 1500 (though I can't find a date for first usage). That would certainly suggest that the custom is of English origin - but has continued to be fairly common in the USA while it has almost died out in England. 217.44.50.87 (talk) 18:14, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Etymonline says the use of a postnominal "junior" meaning the younger of two with the same name dates to 13th century: [1]. The practice apparently diverged during the colonial period, with America retaining the usage. One possibility is that the usage was common only among certain dialects of English; major settlement of the Americas was NOT uniform among English subpopulations. Modern American dialects descend from only a few local English dialects; perhaps that explains the difference. For example, the North was settled primarily by Puritans from East Anglia, accents associated with the American north descend from there (an example from the Wikipedia article titled American English). So, perhaps the regional variation in the use of "Junior" was present in England as well as the Americas, and its continued use in the Americas owes to the specific and peculiar mix of English dialects which crossed the pond. --Jayron 32 20:13, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I remember asking this a few years ago. :) here Henry ^Flower 20:45, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In the 1951 film That's My Boy, Jerry Lewis played a character named "Junior Jackson", and I'm sure I've seen similar things in other oldish movies. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:56, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I've noticed that Americans like to write names out in full, e.g. "Lyndon Baines Johnson", whereas others would simply say "Lyndon Johnson". Why is this? 31.52.139.188 (talk) 00:31, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

That depends on the individual, their preference, and how important others think they are. I go by Ian Thomson and if someone includes my middle name, I probably owe them some sort of paperwork. Most Americans refer to the current president as just Barack Obama, unless they think that his middle name Hussain somehow turns him into some sort of Kenyan Muslim Atheist commie lizard person.

Johnson reportedly had a bit of an ego, though, and it was not unusual for some people then to use the middle name just to make sure you know they weren't just talking about Lyndon Johnson over the hardware store (you know, Ethel's boy?), but the Lyndon Baines Johnson! Ian.thomson (talk) 00:39, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Use of middle names is also famously common in reporting on assassins and other criminals, purportedly to decrease the chance of being sued for libel by the others named Lee Oswald, John Gacy, John Booth and Mark Chapman. The middle name is also used for emphasis by parents who are about to ream out their child. "Johnny Clark Smith" is in more trouble than "Johnny Smith". - Nunh-huh 01:04, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"John Booth" is a bad example; his stage name was "J. Wilkes Booth". --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 14:52, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

His assassin name, however, is John Wilkes Booth. Different sort of performance. - Nunh-huh 01:29, 9 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What was his drag queen name? —Tamfang (talk) 23:33, 9 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Fifi Lafayette"... - Nunh-huh 03:40, 10 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't noticed that the explicit use of three names is any more common in America than in Britain (Arthur Conan Doyle). According to Geoffrey Sampson the distinctively American thing is to use a forename and an initial. (I read on Sampson's website, I guess, that being English he's either Geoffrey Sampson or G. R. Sampson but not Geoffrey R. Sampson.) —Tamfang (talk) 08:47, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Conan Doyle became a peculiar ersatz double-barrelled surname, and if you hear three names in Britain, I think a compound surname is more likely the cause than two forenames, which you'd suspect in the US. - Nunh-huh 01:34, 9 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In some American regions and families (I think of it as an upper-class thing where they like to track how prominent families marry into each other but maybe I'm wrong), there's a custom of using the mother's maiden name as the kids' middle name. For example, Lyndon Baines Johnson's mother was née Rebekah Baines. While Joe Schmoe's parents wouldn't bother with such a custom, and instead they'd give him a normal middle name like Bob. 173.228.123.194 (talk) 01:15, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

My family tree doesn't contain anyone above middle class, but even the poorest of the poor often named their sons and/or daughters to include the mother's maiden name as the kid's middle name. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:43, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Or as a first name, especially for sons. I think that surname as first, rather than middle, name, may be the "upper class" marker. - Nunh-huh 01:34, 9 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Octember"

Dr. Suess's book "The 1st of Octember" is, I believe, an effect of the fact that three of the four months formed by the number prefixes are "-ember" but the "em" is an "o" for October. What is it that caused that in Latin? The fact that Octo- is the prefix and ends in a vowel as opposed to Sept, Nov and Dec or something like that?Naraht (talk) 19:32, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Look at Latin#Numbers - the suffix is just -ber. --Wrongfilter (talk) 19:47, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

So why Sextilis rather than Sexber?Naraht (talk) 20:36, 4 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

You will note from that reference that the numbering gives away the fact that the months were originally counted from March. Maybe by the time they got to July (Quintilis) they had run out of gods and goddesses to name the months after. Quintilis was renamed Julius in honour of Caesar's reform of the calendar and Sextilis was renamed Augustus in honour of his reform of the reform. The discrepancy is not unique - in the French Revolutionary Calendar the first three months all ended in -ose, the next three in -al, the next three in -dor and the last three in -aire. The five days at the end were named sansculottides, literally "no trousers". 31.52.139.188 (talk) 00:30, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

And why were they named that ? StuRat (talk) 00:34, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

By "they" you mean the sansculottides? Obviously in commemoration of the Revolution. See sans-culottes. --69.159.61.172 (talk) 00:56, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

To commemorate the sans-culottes, the working class who wore trousers rather than the knee-breeches worn by nobles. ("Without trousers" is a bit misleading as a translation.) - Nunh-huh 00:58, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

As schoolboys, we preferred "without-underpants" as a translation - see the first definition of Wikt:culotte#French . Alansplodge (talk) 12:19, 5 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Semper ubi sub ubi. -Nunh-huh 16:44, 6 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen London, I've seen France ... —Tamfang (talk) 08:50, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]