Names: My newspaper column -- this week featuring poles, baskets, and manga

[Angalin]

Might be an age thing, Min... the only Randy/Randall's I can think of would be 40+ now. Randy Bachman (of the Guess Who and BTO) might be a factor locally, or Randy Newman as a famous one.

[Ormond]

Sorry for hijacking your thread a bit Ormond, but it seemed like the best place for the question. Now, I'd always assumed that the word "randy" was a specifically British bit of slang for "horny" - it's one of the classic examples that gets rolled out in those "separated by a common language" discussions, like "fanny-pack" - but an American friend has just assured me that this is not the case, and that it means the same thing in the US too. So I was just wondering why (or even if!) there are so many more guys over there that have Randy as a name or a nickname. Is it a regional thing, or an age thing? Or just a mistake that's somehow made it into popular culture when no language difference ever existed at all?

"Randy" has always been found in American dictionaries, but it was NOT a word commonly used in American English until very recently. Frankly I think the Internet itself has made a lot of young people in the USA much more aware of common British words that were formerly very rare in the USA (and probably vice versa).

When I was in my 20s very few people in the USA would have used the word "randy" to mean "over-sexed" in everyday conversation. In fact, the first time I heard of this meaning I was about 19, and the person who told me was a friend called Randy himself (believe it or not, Randall Wallace, the screenwriter of "Braveheart", who lived in my dorm at Duke University and is the most famous person I knew before he got famous.) He was very amused to find out the meaning of "randy", but back then in 1971 he told people that it was "Australian slang." No native-raised American in my generation would have immediately gotten the sexual connotation in the USA. And back when Prince Andrew was young and there was a lot of comment about British tabloids calling him "Randy Andy", my impression was that most of the Americans hearing that assumed the tabloids were calling him "Sexually Attractive Andy", not "Overly Sexually Active Andy."

And even younger people in the USA wouldn't think of Randy as being as inappropriate as a name in the USA simply because they would know men who have it as a name. No one objects to "John" as a name even though it has the meanings of "toilet" and "prostitute's customer" in American slang, because it's also so well-known as a name that people's minds don't immediately "go there" when they hear "John." In the same way, even Americans who are very familiar with the British use of "randy" will not "go there"

immediately when they hear "Randy" as a name -- or certainly not when they read it when it's capitalized. :)

[Mlle. Zabzie]

There are a lot of girls named Randi running around the Northeast as well. I didn't know any until I went to college, but now I know 4 or 5, all born on Long Island in the late 1970s.