60

In a country as populous as the United States, maybe the chances of finding one case of somebody odd enough to call their daughter Fred are reasonable!

Is Andrea really a very uncommon male name? I would have imagined that with the large Italian-American population, there would have been plenty of them.

61

Just noticed Dee up there. The historian Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, is pretty well known. And pretty well known to be male, I thought.

Mary and Maria are not at all unknown as male middle names in Catholci countries. Joseph Mary Plunkett, Irish Rvolutionary. José Maria Aznar, Spanish politician. Carlo Maria Giulini, Italian conductor. Karl Maria von Weber, German conductor. Rainer Maria Rilke, German poet. I have a vague feeling I've seen it as a male first name (of two names) but don't remember where.

62

I see a bishop Maria Giuseppe Avila OP, died 1656.

Ihave a friend Andrew named for his grandfather Andrea, who lived here most of his life.

63

If they're not gender errors, a couple more of the female names on nutrax's list could be explained by foreign origin. Raymonde is a French female name, albeit a very dated one. And Fred for a girl is also possible in French - Frédérique is the female version of Frédéric.

64

Oh, and Shirley Povich was a longtime sportswriter for the Washington Post, father of the TV host Maury Povitch. I doubt it was a family name in his casel

65

in Britain we are used to men being called Shirley, though it is thought rather odd. I think this is mainly because there was a professional male wrestler called Shirley Crabtree, who used the stagename Big Daddy. He was a professional rugby player earlier in his career. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Crabtree Also Shirley Ghostman is the character name of a male British parody/comedy psychic/medium act, but it is a very camp act.

(Aside: I went to school in a place called Shirley, being a suburb in south London, part of Croydon.)

Les was pretty common as a male name in Britain for people born in about the 20s/40s, and usually short for Leslie. Though in my generation (born 60s) Leslie/Lesley had become more or less entirely appropriated as a girl's name. There was a boy in my class who had Leslie as a middle name, and was teased about it, though he was the kind of boy who would be teased about anything. We had periodic discussions about whether the spelling Leslie/Lesley was distinctive as to sex, without any conclusion.

For a decade or so I sang in choir conducted by (male) Hilary Davan Wetton (or Divan Wet-One as we called him, as he had an eye for the ladies, and had numerous children with several wives), who runs to his own Wikipedia entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Davan_Wetton (*) I think this is a case of the name being appropriated by the women, as I haven't come across any other male Hilarys of modern times, though there are several male St Hilarys, and also a pope.

I used to work in a company where there were 3 people with Italian surnames and first name Andrea, but only two were male; I think the other one was n'th generation and had little knowledge of Italy or Italian.

(*) If one was cruel, one might mention that saying attributed to Beecham, "I don't know why we import so many 2nd-rate foreign conductors when we have so many 3rd-rate ones of our own." But actually, especially considering he had a day job as a school-teacher, he was a remarkably effective conductor of chamber orchestras and string ensembles, and quite a few of his recordings got good reviews from reputable reviewers, notably works of obscure 19th century composers.

66

I spent some time with Ancestry.com looking for male Marilyns and female Joses in older census records. I found a huge number for both. The nice thing about Ancestry is that you can look at the original document to verify it.

A number were obviously bad transcriptions. Marilyn was really Marion. Or was really female. Or the census-takers handwriting was so terrible that it could have been Chumley. But many were genuine.

Jose was a bit more interesting. Some seemed genuine. Some looked like problems with gringo census-takers dealing with Spanish speakers. There was something called "Indian census" where it was pretty obvious that the census-taker was struggling. For example, one person was listed only as "wife of Jose Wiel."

My favorite, though, was Sister Mary Jose Phine. Sister Mary Jose lived in a convent in New Orleans. Under "relationship to head" the head nun was listed as "Sister Superior." Everyone else was an "inmate."

67

I've known both a male Hilary and a male Lesley born in the 1970s or 1980s in Ireland. I seem to recall that the former drew rather more comment.

Florence is another name that seems to have become very unusual for men - but perhaps it was only in Ireland that it was ever much in use as a male name.

68

British-born Bob Hope was christened Leslie. And Leslie Howard was male, of course. John Wayne was Marion.

69

The American male philosopher of science Hilary Putnam was born in 1926.

I once proctored/monitored/invigilated an exam of his, which had one question: if you were writing an exam for this course and could ask only one question, (a) what would it be and (b) how would you answer it?

I thought that if I were taking the course, i would be sorely tempted to write:

If I were writing an exam for this course and could only ask one question, it would be:"If you were writing an exam for this course and could only ask one question, (a) what would it be and (b) how would you answer it?" and I would answer it as follows: "If I were writing an exam . . .

And keep going like that filling up bluebooks until I had to scrawl TIME!!! across the bottom of the last page.

But I knew I wouldn't have the nerve.

70

I can't help hoping that someone did answer it like that.

71

Classic urban legend: Philosophy exam consists of one word: "Why?" Student answers "Why not?" and gets an A. snopes

72

My guess is that almost everyone said something like "I wish I had the nerve to write . . . But I don't," and then wrote a more expected answer to the question.

73

Dutch version of that urban legend: Task for high school graduation is to write an essay titled 'What is having guts'?
One guy wrote 'This is having guts!', handed it in and left. Of course he got a 10 (Dutch for 'A').