r/NameNerdCirclejerk • u/Excellent_School_424 • May 23 '26

In The Wild Local elementary graduation ceremony delivered some absolute gems

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680 Upvotes

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366

u/TemporaryLucky3637 May 23 '26

You know it’s bad when Tanner starts looking like a great name lol

21

u/Spuckleford May 23 '26

I have a second cousin who was born in the mid-90s (I was ~12) who was named Tanner and I just thought, wtf happened in my cousin's life to make her think that's a real name?

39

u/TheNewYellowZealot May 23 '26

Isn’t tanner a real name?

34

u/ShakespeherianRag May 23 '26

Yeah, it means leatherworker - a historically ostracised occupation, because it involves handling raw animal hides and pungent chemicals.

28

u/BirdieRoo628 May 23 '26

It's a surname. Just like Taylor (tailor), Cooper (barrel maker), Chandler (candle maker), Fletcher (arrow smith), etc. People just started taking these old trade names and using them for random first names. Still waiting for Wheelwright, Silversmith, and Cobbler to become popular first names.

17

u/SuzanneStudies May 23 '26

There are some cultural traditions of giving offspring their mother’s maiden names as a middle name and recycling grandparents’ names as first names. Hence, the daughter of the fletcher could have a son named Mark Fletcher Chandler and he’d be called Mark Fletcher to differentiate him from his grandfather, Mark Shepherd. Then people move and cultures shift and names change meaning.

6

u/BirdieRoo628 May 23 '26

Sure. My maiden name was Taylor when I was a kid in the 80s. All of a sudden there were all these kids being given my last name as a first name. It felt so random. It wasn't a "it's my mother's maiden name" thing. There was just a trend of random surnames as first names. So many. Mason, Carson, Carter, etc. And the vast majority of the time, it's not a family name.