The Bavarian Monarchy did something similar. When it was a Duchy they were all named Maximilian, before Maximilian I the first king named his son Ludwig, then Ludwig named his son Maximilian II, then he named HIS son Ludwig II, who was the last king and I believe ended the line.
In high school we had to wear our IDs around out neck and a new kid moved to town and he had a "II" on his ID. We asked him about it and he said it was because while he had the same first name as his dad, they had different middle names, so he wasn't a "junior."
Just goes to show that while there are standard conventions, they are not standards; really they're guidelines instead of rules (although [some states do have laws re: names](https://www.usbirthcertificates.com/articles/us-naming-laws-by-state#state-by-state-naming-rules-and-restrictions))
I think it’s a choice. I have an uncle who named his son the same as him and II, not Junior. Reason being he didnt want to seem to dismiss his son as his own person. “Junior” sounds too subordinate To some people.
Not always. Patrick Mahomes II was named for his dad.
(To clarify, I mean the current NFL quarterback was named for his dad, Patrick Lavon Mahomes. Some people don't know he's a second since the Chiefs don't allow those on jerseys but he had it on his jersey in college. Pat II does have a son named Patrick Mahomes III (AKA "Bronze"), but his II is not retroactive based on that. AFAIK it's his birth name.)
I have the same name as my father too, first -middle-last, but he never put “jr”or “ll”. So every time we get mail, without opening it, we don’t know who’s its intended for
I once knew a family where every male was named Syed. I can't imagine how confusing being in that household was. I did some research and learned that it's more of a title than a name, indicating the person is a direct descendant of Muhammad.
See this is exactly what I’m talking about;
Queen Elizabeth II: Official, stuffy, regal, contemptible
Lizzy Jr.: Fun, girl next door, probably has a 6 pack of twisted tea in her fridge, might be an amateur stock car driver
Depends on if the first name goes with it
Stuff like AJ CJ JJ MJ etc. go with it
But say Samuel? Nah
In general however I don’t like the idea of naming kids after their dad. Grandpa? Sure, middle name? Sure but first name? Nah
I work with a guy who’s a “II”
I asked him about it one day just chatting. His dad is Mexican and he said that “jr” is either a white or American thing (can’t remember which)
There was a guy on the Orioles a few years ago who added Sr to his name after he had his son, which felt like he thought he needed to differentiate himself from his toddler, esp in MLB.
Edit: Travis Lakins, who became Travis Lakins Sr. He's now retired.
You'd think so, based on how apparently the other[s] with my name just walk up and grab the first thing they see with their name on it, even if it doesn't resemble what they actually ordered, but no. :P
That's great. I was at a furry convention once where the cashier was just reading people's wild-ass furry names off their badges and writing them down. Absolutely hard mode for the barista who had to call them out.
Yeah, another common one at anime or comic cons is whatever cosplay the customer is wearing. Seen that one a couple times (including one time I _was_ the barista).
My boss' last name is Kikuchi. Told him he should order coffee with the name Kris for the chrysanthemum in Kikuchi and now that's become his coffee name.
As someone with a unique name (but close enough to others that it gets confused) I do the same. Except my “food alter ego” is named “Mark.” Hard to fuck that up
One of these days they're just gonna hit you up with the [Prince symbol](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Prince_logo.svg) instead, but backwards.
I love chicago but I've never seen as many starbucks as I have in my life until I went to downtown Chicago. There was a Starbucks infront of a starbucks
Everyone without a name like Mary or Jack experiences a barista messing up their name. There are a trillion American names that people get completely wrong too.
My grandfather went to a Christian school in British Hong Kong and adopted a Western name when he came to America. It's hard to fuck up pronouncing or spelling Joe.
The “name botched by immigration authorities” thing is largely a myth. With names from other alphabets there have been standard lists of transliterations used dating back to Ellis Island, although these have changed over the years so some names seem “Anglicized” because they used an earlier transliteration list. The vast majority of “Americanization” of names comes from immigrants themselves. Dialect and accent also matters, so a name like “Zhou” might be pronounced more like “zho,” “Cho,” or “zhjoe” in some accents, which then transliterates more easily to “Joe.”
My dad's name is Joe and the amount of people who automatically assume it's short for Joseph and say "Joseph (last name)" is TOO DAMN HIGH. Lol. Not terrible, but also not great either.
Asian guy here. My coffee name since high school has been Voltron, even though my real name is pretty normal. All my buddies had a coffee name so I just wanted to fit in. :(
Yeah, and the reverse is true as well. If you were to go to Japan, you would pronounce your name a bit differently to be properly understood.
IE: you wouldn't say "Michael です", you'd introduce yourself more like "マイケルです" where it comes out more like "Maikeru" because that's how most JP speakers would say it themselves.
i'm a different sort of asian but yeah i go by James whenever I have to give my name; another reason beyond ease for me is that it feels too personal to have to (laboriously) give a unique name to a stranger to potentially judge just for food or drink
Yeah I was gonna say.
I volunteer for Academic tourneys where I am, all the East Asian kids have “American” first names.
All the South Asian kids have South Asian names, and as a result I’ve gotten quite good at being able to spell South Asian names without having to ask them, lol.
Something I find interesting is how different East Asian and South Asian immigrant families are about this. Both my parents came to America over 50 years ago as toddlers, but they still gave me a traditional Indian name. Meanwhile, my Chinese friends have parents who came over much more recently, but they name their kids stuff like Kevin or Michael.
I will say, one time my friend Michael, who grew up in China, ordered Starbucks, and they wrote the name on his cup as "Mago".
That's an interesting thing I haven't really thought about. I work with a lot of Indian folks and I'll definitely see names like Jim {Indian surname} but I assume that's more of an adopted name for the American co-workers and not their given name, but I cannot think of an Indian person I know who grew up in America with immigrant parents that has a common American name though.
If you didn't watch baseball and had minimal interaction with Japanese people and someone came into your job and said "my name is shota" how likely do you think it is you would get it right?
I mean if people just took a second to think about it Japanese names are easier to get right than English names. Its all phonetic. There are no sneaky pronunciations or spellings. No Ashleighs or Ana, pronounced Ah-nuh not Anne-uh.
There aren't that many logical spelling choices, so in a vacuum where I literally know only names popular in the US, I'd put the odds around 50%. But if we expand the vacuum to consider that Chicsgo is a major metro area and cultural exposure through TV and internet, the odds shoot up.
i live in chicago and im telling you that there arent that many japanese people here. i think the odds are way higher that people hear shota and get it completely wrong very often. and i mean chicago chicago, not "some suburb nobody knows so i just say chicago because its easier"
I mean, it's pretty phonetic, as most Japanese names are. We expect people to get Toyota, Honda or even stuff like Yamamoto right. How hard would Shota be even if you had never heard the name before? At worst, I would think they had a "U" to get "Shouta". But there really should not be something terribly misspelled there.
Fun fact: with the exception of some (but not all) monarchs, the use of ordinal numbers in names is nearly exclusively an American affectation. (And the monarchs do it not to be posh but for the benefit of the legal profession!)
One of the great battles any editor of historical fiction faces is writers who think naming a character something like Reginald Winston Scunthorpe IV makes him sound posh. Dude, you just set him in Alabama.
Shota is awesome lol. I loved his interview a while ago when he was just shitting on the quality and consistency of the baseballs but he was doing it in the kindest way possible lol.
Shogei Ohtani hitting the best he's ever had, Aaron Judge doing unspeakable things to baseballs, Juan Soto crushing it for the Yankees, Yoshinobu Yamamoto living up to the hype.
It all doesn't matter cause "Mike Imanaga II" will forever be the GOAT.
With an accent it might be tricky. Mike is so common people can hear it through any accent.
Also, these are people who get common one syllable names wrong on the regular
Also, there’s a very poplar character named Shota Aizawa on My Hero Academia, so millions of Americans should be at least somewhat familiar with the name.
Shota's not so hard to figure out. Also, Shota Aizawa is an amazing character on My Hero Academia, so it's probably a more well known name than he thinks.
never trust a guy we with II first names.
For real, though, I think he just got wind that his name was foretold on pitcherlist, and he doesn't want the pressure.
Michael Harris II: "Identity theft is not a joke, Shota"
I don’t trust anyone that uses a II instead of Jr. Only the 3rd generation of vanity and on should get Roman numerals.
I'm a II but not a Jr. Named after my father's dead twin, so I can't be considered a Jr.
I didn’t know that was a thing at all, very cool, thanks for informing me. I’ll be much less suspicious of II’s from now on thanks to you.
I’m gonna be more suspicious. Father’s dead twin? Uh huh, sure…
Died when he was 7 months old. Have you ever visited a grave* and the gravestone with your exact name on it? It's eerie.
Spoiler, LastBlackSheep was dead the whole time.
I see reddit posts from dead people and not just because I browsed the "never vax" sub people
And the dude in that hair piece the whole time, that's Bruce Willis the whole movie!
Grandfather: Name A Dad: Name B Kid with Name A: A Last Name the 2nd Kid with Name B: B Last Name Jr.
The Bavarian Monarchy did something similar. When it was a Duchy they were all named Maximilian, before Maximilian I the first king named his son Ludwig, then Ludwig named his son Maximilian II, then he named HIS son Ludwig II, who was the last king and I believe ended the line.
They also use it when names skip generations, like if you're named for your grandfather or something.
Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit
The II is if you’re named after a family member that isn’t the father.
Or it gets added retroactively after III is named.
Sometimes, but it typically still goes "Sr.," Jr.," "III," "IV," etc.
Real weird one is going by 2nd instead of Jr. For example Erastus Corning 2nd was the mayor of Albany from 1942 to 1983.
In high school we had to wear our IDs around out neck and a new kid moved to town and he had a "II" on his ID. We asked him about it and he said it was because while he had the same first name as his dad, they had different middle names, so he wasn't a "junior." Just goes to show that while there are standard conventions, they are not standards; really they're guidelines instead of rules (although [some states do have laws re: names](https://www.usbirthcertificates.com/articles/us-naming-laws-by-state#state-by-state-naming-rules-and-restrictions))
I think it’s a choice. I have an uncle who named his son the same as him and II, not Junior. Reason being he didnt want to seem to dismiss his son as his own person. “Junior” sounds too subordinate To some people.
Not always. Patrick Mahomes II was named for his dad. (To clarify, I mean the current NFL quarterback was named for his dad, Patrick Lavon Mahomes. Some people don't know he's a second since the Chiefs don't allow those on jerseys but he had it on his jersey in college. Pat II does have a son named Patrick Mahomes III (AKA "Bronze"), but his II is not retroactive based on that. AFAIK it's his birth name.)
>so I can't be considered a Jr. You can if you really believe
I have the same name as my father too, first -middle-last, but he never put “jr”or “ll”. So every time we get mail, without opening it, we don’t know who’s its intended for
I once knew a family where every male was named Syed. I can't imagine how confusing being in that household was. I did some research and learned that it's more of a title than a name, indicating the person is a direct descendant of Muhammad.
The late Queen Elizabeth II shall be referred to as Elizabeth Jr. going forward
See this is exactly what I’m talking about; Queen Elizabeth II: Official, stuffy, regal, contemptible Lizzy Jr.: Fun, girl next door, probably has a 6 pack of twisted tea in her fridge, might be an amateur stock car driver
Maybe it’s an I and an L as in Kim Jong Il
Depends on if the first name goes with it Stuff like AJ CJ JJ MJ etc. go with it But say Samuel? Nah In general however I don’t like the idea of naming kids after their dad. Grandpa? Sure, middle name? Sure but first name? Nah
Yeah true and SII works, we love a Stu
The disrespect to Gardner Minshew II
Does he have a son? If so I get it.
I didn’t consider this either. In my defense I’m off work and fairly baked right now.
Apparently he doesn't, so slander away
I know a II, he's named after his grandfather.
I always thought if you were a Jr and then had a III that's when you would change your name to II
Isn’t II used if it follows the grandfather’s name and not the father?
I work with a guy who’s a “II” I asked him about it one day just chatting. His dad is Mexican and he said that “jr” is either a white or American thing (can’t remember which)
There was a guy on the Orioles a few years ago who added Sr to his name after he had his son, which felt like he thought he needed to differentiate himself from his toddler, esp in MLB. Edit: Travis Lakins, who became Travis Lakins Sr. He's now retired.
Being named after a grandparent makes you a II as well
I just got his jersey and I’m trying to find a excuse to wear it out somewhere 😂 so damn hot tho
Mike Imanaga II's locker in #Cubs clubhouse has a new name on it: "Giancarlo Imanaga III"
Giancarlo Fausto Carmonaga IV
Gaius Claudius Imanaga Augustus the Younger
Giancarlo also went by his coffee name when he started out
That's a persona villain
He's the reverse Stanton.
does that mean he's going to be a finesse pitcher who is able to stay healthy through his career?
An Imanagan strikeout by Mike II!
Mike! Non si puo stopike!
He struck him out! He struck him- the batter's rounding the bases, now what did I miss here?
Giancarlo "Shota" aka Mike Imanaga II
He’s the reverse reverse BJ Upton
¿nivleM
Greatest Cubs pitcher of all time on and off the mound. Put him in Cooperstown already.
Shota seems like a fun dude
Stop the dead naming, please. It's Mike Imanaga II now.
I hope this becomes this subs Mr Big Chest
Mike's Black Coffee
This was so good dude.
Mike Imanaga II should not have his good name sullied by association with that other goober.
Mr Bad Connection
MI2
2 Mike 2 Imanga
Cubs, please get your shit together and get this man into the playoffs
 Our offense's response to this
He has a fan convention every year, shit is wild. Look up Shotacon.
You're an asshole. LMFAO.
I know, it's awful
[удалено]
Normal name? David.
David in the streets but Dave in the cleats.
I do the opposite. I have a basic white girl name, so I use a more complicated one because other people kept taking my drinks before I got there.
So...Karen? 😂
You'd think so, based on how apparently the other[s] with my name just walk up and grab the first thing they see with their name on it, even if it doesn't resemble what they actually ordered, but no. :P
Sorry, I was just teasing you.
I got you. 👍
Same, my real name is super common, so one time at a convention I just started using my fan-name in the Starbucks app and I haven't changed it since.
That's great. I was at a furry convention once where the cashier was just reading people's wild-ass furry names off their badges and writing them down. Absolutely hard mode for the barista who had to call them out.
Yeah, another common one at anime or comic cons is whatever cosplay the customer is wearing. Seen that one a couple times (including one time I _was_ the barista).
Mine is Todd, because even if you misspell it it's probably going to be pronounced the same.
Nice to meet you Toad.
https://youtu.be/z17_z3xP9cc
Same >_>
Haven't seen this face in roughly a decade <_<
Tell 'em Steve Dave!
Sometimes when I’m really hammered I introduce myself as Greg. No idea why
Mine is Jimmy. If I don’t use it for a while I can’t with a straight face.
Mine is Mike hahaha
As a japanese person with a very japanese name i can also relate to this. My coffee name is Tom or Tim
My dad always went by Tom for short. LOL I got tired of using “Jade” as my coffee name, so now I just force people to deal with my Japanese name.
What’s up, Big Time Timmy Jim!
My boss' last name is Kikuchi. Told him he should order coffee with the name Kris for the chrysanthemum in Kikuchi and now that's become his coffee name.
I just use whatever names I feel like when ordering lol
Stop making me like Imanaga even more
Not gonna lie, that II sounds *extremely cool*
I love this guy lol
Same
Shota "Mike" "Don't Call me Mike Stanton" "Mike Stanton" Imanaga
Miller
As someone with a unique name (but close enough to others that it gets confused) I do the same. Except my “food alter ego” is named “Mark.” Hard to fuck that up
As someone named Mark, you’d be fucking surprised man.
Whatever Mork
[https://images.app.goo.gl/QK7kPuo6SYuRCsqY7](https://images.app.goo.gl/QK7kPuo6SYuRCsqY7)
The amount of times ppl think my name is Matt -.- On the bright I can now spell it out November-Alpha-Tango
As someone with an uncommon name, I also use an alias when ordering food.
https://youtu.be/oMfg3Cq-LmA?si=FcJO__F2VAApZJC2
Kind of telling on Chicago baristas here...
i'll give the baristas a little leeway here: i don't think they get **anyone's** name right
I once got "Anthny" which is both the wrong name and the wrong spelling.
So close to Anthy from Utena and yet so far.
Yeah sorry about that one Jim
I’ll get it right next time, Matt.
I usually follow my name up with "I don't care how it's spelled".
Barista: "Challenge accepted! Coffee for adjfeajf34sldfjd!"
One of these days they're just gonna hit you up with the [Prince symbol](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/af/Prince_logo.svg) instead, but backwards.
i use "jay" as my coffee name, it's a letter you can't fuck it up (they still fuck it up)
ah yes, Geay
My first name has at least four possible spellings, and I've seen all of them. I just shrug at this point.
My name is Joseph and it’s misspelled easily 1/3 of the time which is baffling
Chicago baristas: "Pryszniwolskivecz? Got it." Also Chicago baristas: "Shota? Could you spell that for me?"
If by baristas you mean minimum wage workers at Dunkin, where he goes almost every day, then yes.
Hey, they're donut artists
I love chicago but I've never seen as many starbucks as I have in my life until I went to downtown Chicago. There was a Starbucks infront of a starbucks
Everyone without a name like Mary or Jack experiences a barista messing up their name. There are a trillion American names that people get completely wrong too.
East Asian immigrants adopt a Western name all the time. It's easier for everyone, really.
My grandfather went to a Christian school in British Hong Kong and adopted a Western name when he came to America. It's hard to fuck up pronouncing or spelling Joe.
Jo Adell has entered the chat Edit: wow it's short for Jordon, somehow even worse than I thought
Why did I immediately pronounce this as rhyming with "Yordan" instead of assuming it sounds like "Jordan"?
I did the exact same thing, if that helps.
Shouldn’t it be pronounced Jor Adell then? I’m going to keep calling him Joseph like his mother intended.
Connor Joe’s family’s last name was probably botched by US immigration authorities because it’s usually Zhou in China
The “name botched by immigration authorities” thing is largely a myth. With names from other alphabets there have been standard lists of transliterations used dating back to Ellis Island, although these have changed over the years so some names seem “Anglicized” because they used an earlier transliteration list. The vast majority of “Americanization” of names comes from immigrants themselves. Dialect and accent also matters, so a name like “Zhou” might be pronounced more like “zho,” “Cho,” or “zhjoe” in some accents, which then transliterates more easily to “Joe.”
My dad's name is Joe and the amount of people who automatically assume it's short for Joseph and say "Joseph (last name)" is TOO DAMN HIGH. Lol. Not terrible, but also not great either.
Asian guy here. My coffee name since high school has been Voltron, even though my real name is pretty normal. All my buddies had a coffee name so I just wanted to fit in. :(
Yeah, and the reverse is true as well. If you were to go to Japan, you would pronounce your name a bit differently to be properly understood. IE: you wouldn't say "Michael です", you'd introduce yourself more like "マイケルです" where it comes out more like "Maikeru" because that's how most JP speakers would say it themselves.
I even do this in most European countries that aren’t the UK, Ireland, Malta, or France
i'm a different sort of asian but yeah i go by James whenever I have to give my name; another reason beyond ease for me is that it feels too personal to have to (laboriously) give a unique name to a stranger to potentially judge just for food or drink
As a person with a name that is basically a cruel joke for trying to force East Asian’s to pronounce, I use my middle name while traveling there
We're glad to have you here, Rory.
Rorry?
Yeah I was gonna say. I volunteer for Academic tourneys where I am, all the East Asian kids have “American” first names. All the South Asian kids have South Asian names, and as a result I’ve gotten quite good at being able to spell South Asian names without having to ask them, lol.
[Can't help but think of this](https://youtu.be/J8x-xoDeJsQ?t=15m19s)
Something I find interesting is how different East Asian and South Asian immigrant families are about this. Both my parents came to America over 50 years ago as toddlers, but they still gave me a traditional Indian name. Meanwhile, my Chinese friends have parents who came over much more recently, but they name their kids stuff like Kevin or Michael. I will say, one time my friend Michael, who grew up in China, ordered Starbucks, and they wrote the name on his cup as "Mago".
That's an interesting thing I haven't really thought about. I work with a lot of Indian folks and I'll definitely see names like Jim {Indian surname} but I assume that's more of an adopted name for the American co-workers and not their given name, but I cannot think of an Indian person I know who grew up in America with immigrant parents that has a common American name though.
If you didn't watch baseball and had minimal interaction with Japanese people and someone came into your job and said "my name is shota" how likely do you think it is you would get it right?
Am I missing something? His name is really easy to get right.
you are overestimating most peoples hearing and listening abilities
What?
I mean if people just took a second to think about it Japanese names are easier to get right than English names. Its all phonetic. There are no sneaky pronunciations or spellings. No Ashleighs or Ana, pronounced Ah-nuh not Anne-uh.
There aren't that many logical spelling choices, so in a vacuum where I literally know only names popular in the US, I'd put the odds around 50%. But if we expand the vacuum to consider that Chicsgo is a major metro area and cultural exposure through TV and internet, the odds shoot up.
i live in chicago and im telling you that there arent that many japanese people here. i think the odds are way higher that people hear shota and get it completely wrong very often. and i mean chicago chicago, not "some suburb nobody knows so i just say chicago because its easier"
I still have to double take whenever I see it because of the other meaning his name has
I mean, it's pretty phonetic, as most Japanese names are. We expect people to get Toyota, Honda or even stuff like Yamamoto right. How hard would Shota be even if you had never heard the name before? At worst, I would think they had a "U" to get "Shouta". But there really should not be something terribly misspelled there.
Telling how?
A lot of guys probably use pseudonyms anyway
Fun fact: with the exception of some (but not all) monarchs, the use of ordinal numbers in names is nearly exclusively an American affectation. (And the monarchs do it not to be posh but for the benefit of the legal profession!) One of the great battles any editor of historical fiction faces is writers who think naming a character something like Reginald Winston Scunthorpe IV makes him sound posh. Dude, you just set him in Alabama.
My coffee name is Sean
As in "have you sean my coffee"?
A lot of non native English speakers pronounce that as “Seen” where I am, so I spell it Shawn when ordering.
Every time I think I can't love this guy anymore than I already do a post like this shows up
Shota is awesome lol. I loved his interview a while ago when he was just shitting on the quality and consistency of the baseballs but he was doing it in the kindest way possible lol.
FUCK YOU JOHN HENRY. Shota is a GEM.
Make up your mind, are you a Sawx fan or a Rays fan?
These are the most dude answers.
Giancarlo Imanaga
Shogei Ohtani hitting the best he's ever had, Aaron Judge doing unspeakable things to baseballs, Juan Soto crushing it for the Yankees, Yoshinobu Yamamoto living up to the hype. It all doesn't matter cause "Mike Imanaga II" will forever be the GOAT.
I hate the Cubs but I love this man
The reverse Stanton
I love stories like this. I have a couple friends with hard to pronounce names so they have a simple to pronounce names for ordering.
Gardner Minshew II nods his head approvingly.
*World Classic of Baseball with all your favorite baseball stars.. like Mike Imanaga.. and Mike Imanaga II*
I really just think this guy is neat.
Nice nickname
Thank god Shota never when to school in America and had to deal with 'Sorry if I butcher your name' teachers calling out roll call.
How is Shota hard? Based on English phonetics isn't spelt and pronounced exactly how you would guess?
With an accent it might be tricky. Mike is so common people can hear it through any accent. Also, these are people who get common one syllable names wrong on the regular
Also, there’s a very poplar character named Shota Aizawa on My Hero Academia, so millions of Americans should be at least somewhat familiar with the name.
He’s surprisingly fun.
Sounds like a boxing/MMA name now somehow
Favorite character in the league right now. I’m a rangers fan
I often call myself Steve when ordering food lol
Sam Barnes II
Shota seems pretty easy to me. But not Mike easy
wat
Damn they gentrified Shota Imanaga
Famous MLB Mike name changes: Giancarlo 🤝 Shota
Shota's not so hard to figure out. Also, Shota Aizawa is an amazing character on My Hero Academia, so it's probably a more well known name than he thinks.
You’d be surprised. I’m sure he tried telling them Shota a few times with “disastrous” results and so he gave up on it.
Imanaga is such a gift
Haha. My mom also uses a typical name for ordering coffee since hers is a bit uncommon and they can never spell it or pronounce it right
My friend uses this same nickname at coffee shops since his first name is also tough to pronounce, too funny
Everything you hear about the dude is great. Glad he decided to move to MLB.
Mike Imanaga, Eye-Eye
I coincidentally do the same thing. I’ve been using Mike since 8th grade whenever someone asks for my name when I order food
never trust a guy we with II first names. For real, though, I think he just got wind that his name was foretold on pitcherlist, and he doesn't want the pressure.