I’ve written about this before. The “names” attached to spam you get in your e-mail.
When I go into the spam folder in gmail I often am fascinated by the names someone has invented for the junk they’re trying to sell you or the lottery winnings they want to hand over.
Today’s list?
Staci Amos. Lavonne Kyla. Loreta Earlean. Gertrude Gregg. Monika Susie. I also have Troy Bartless in there, but that might even be a real person who is trying to sell me a “Uinversity Dgeree” program. Anyway, if it’s fake, he/she is failing the imagination test.
Maybe we should have a contest for “most ridiculous yet oddly compelling spam name.”
One that is both ridiculous but imaginative.
Might even be some commercial application for this. Have you ever noticed how fiction writers try really hard to use/invent names that probably don’t exist in the real world? Presumably so they don’t get hassled by the people who have those names.
Names that sound like names without really being names. Like Jack Reacher. Frances Neagley. Mary Ellen Froelich.
Those three are from the Lee Child (also a fake name) “Reacher” series.
So, anyway, a whole world of fiction writers are dying for some patently fake but potentially believable names.
Feel free to send along any really good/bad ones you see.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Maggie // Feb 22, 2011 at 4:43 PM
Funny thing, though – Frances Neagley and Mary Ellen Froelich are real people. Both ladies won an auction at Bouchercon (world’s largest mystery convention) a few years back and the prize was to have characters named after them in Without Fail :).
2 Dennis Pope // Feb 23, 2011 at 2:59 PM
Usually, I get ones that are Asian, like today “Joon Kyu,” or they’re plain sounding, like “Karen Miller” or “John C. Harlan.”
3 Staci Amos // Apr 17, 2012 at 11:24 AM
HA! My name IS Staci Amos! So it is an actual name, just not a common one at all…
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