The middle initial and other naming thoughts
By Brian Clegg
I have a middle initial (M) but have never used it as my name on the books I have written. It’s probably a little perverse, but over on the Popular Science book review site, I usually omit the middle initials of US authors’ names as they almost always seem to have them, a piece of editorial practice slightly inspired by the way the Wall Street Journal won’t use titles like Dr.
Having said that, I would always give a child a middle name – it feels unnecessarily depriving not to have one. If we’d had a boy, I would have rather liked to have used the middle name Jay, primarily because I imagine a conversation going something like:
What’s your middle initial?
J
What does that stand for?
Jay
I know what it is but, what does it stand for?.. and so on.
My very Anglo-Saxon surname has sometimes made me also wish for a more romantic alternative. (Allegedly my distant ancestors, after the Norman invasion, went through a phase of referring to themselves as de Clegg, an unlikely combo). The other problem with the name Clegg is that we come from near the border between Lancashire and Yorkshire, and though we definitely belongs to the area around Littleborough in Lancashire where I went to primary school (there’s even a Clegg Hall), some misguided people think it’s a Yorkshire name.
What would I prefer? I did once know someone with the surname De’Ath – I wouldn’t go that far, but I would have loved to be Mr Darke. It has to have the E (that’s about the only thing that Ray Bradbury got wrong in the wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes) – but with that it’s the perfect romantically mysterious surname.
Image from Unsplash by Woliul Hasan
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Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/10/the-middle-initial-and-other-naming.html
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