Who's your name?

My first post is inspired by the family of a friend of mine, who have an unusually high density of names that are also words.  Let me explain.  My friend's name is Kurt.  Curt means "rudely brief in speech or abrupt in manner."  So Kurt's name is also a word.  Curt.  You see where I'm going with this.  The name doesn't have to be spelled exactly like the word, but it does have to at least be a homophone.  As another example, Kurt's sister is Laci.  Lacy, obviously meaning, pertaining to or resembling lace.  See, nothing too hard yet.

Here's where things get interesting.  Laci married Jordan.  Whoa! you say.  Jordan isn't a word!  Unless you're gonna count proper nouns or river names!  Well, that's where you're wrong.  I won't be counting proper nouns and the like, but if you keep yelling at me and ending your sentences with exclamation points, I might just dump my jordan (a portable container for urine, used in bedrooms) on you.  The one major design flaw is that it's a lacy jordan, so it typically just leaks everywhere.

Continuing, Laci and Jordan have a daughter named Abby.  An abbey, as you probably know, being a monastery or convent.  And we haven't even gotten to where this all started, Kurt's parents Barney and Pansy.  Take your pick with pansy.  I'll give you either "a flower of the violet family" or "a weak or cowardly man," depending on your disposition.  Barney, though, is an interesting one.  You've got choices with barney, too.  It can either mean "an argument or brawl" or "a small locomotive used for mining."  Do you think two miners have ever been involved in a barney while riding on a barney?  By the way, you can file that one in sentences that haven't ever been uttered before.

I guess that would make Kurt's brother Jason the black sheep of the family, with no words attached to his name.  To make up for this, Jason had to have children of his own.  After conceiving a baby daughter, he named his progeny Siena.  Spelled with two N's, sienna can refer to either a yellowish-brown or reddish-brown pigment.  And not be outdone, Kurt - following in the familial tradition - named his daughter not only a word, but a color as well, when he introduced baby Scarlett into the world 16 months ago.

To summarize the vocabulary we've learned here today, I present you with the following sentence you can study at your leisure:
Jason, touring a sienna-tinged mine underneath an abbey's pansy garden, became upset at the miner's curt tone, and got his revenge by dumping a lacy jordan on top of the scarlet barney the miner was riding in.


If you've enjoyed this post, feel free to take a vocabulary quiz I created at dictionary.com, using the 50 most popular baby names of 2010.  The link is here: http://dynamo.dictionary.com/217469/names-that-are-also-tricky-words.  The quiz was created using dictionary.com's Word Dynamo tool, which is pretty cool.  You can just take quizzes other people have created, or make your own and study words that you've learned recently.  Word Dynamo will even estimate the total number of English words you know based on your performance on their quizzes.  (I'm up to 57,134).  I just went through a massive undertaking and compiled quizzes of every word I learned in 2011.  You can search for them at Word Dynamo by just typing "Words I Learned in 2011" into the search bar.  There's 20-something volumes of them, which should keep you busy for far longer than you care to be.

Let me know how you do on the quizzes if you care to take any of them.
And are there any members of your family that have names that are unusual words, like barney or jordan?