Name Order


I was just discussing with my friend Ryan what the reasons are in the way we order two people’s names. For instance, Duke and Gloria. Bob and Stella. Ron and Claudia. These sound natural. But Gloria and Duke sounds wrong. Why?


After much discussion, we have come up with this…


If the two names are of different sexes, the male name always comes first. Yeah that’s right, we have the penises, get over it.


If the two names are of the same sex, the “soft” name comes first, and the “hard” name comes second. For instance Susan has no hard sounds. But Patricia has a hard P and T sound, so it comes second.


If both names have hard sounds, the name with fewer syllables comes first. For instance, Pam and Patricia.


And that’s about as far as we got. We agreed on all of the scenarios we came up with… Was it a fluke, or is there really a set of sub-conscious rules for this type of thing?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2005 at 4:54 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can feed this entry. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses

  1. I have two twin brothers named Pat and Paul.

    ‘Pat and Paul’ is the more natural sounding versus ‘Paul and Pat’

    Matt Stanzel - March 16th, 2005 at 1:16 am

  2. It goes in order of syllables.

    The faster name is always first.

    Nostalgia - March 23rd, 2005 at 12:00 pm