Something I'm kind of struggling to wrap my head around. Is there a way for multiple word given names to work in English? Have you ever seen it done well? Just from a grammatical standpoint, it seems very difficult to construct sentences around a character with a name that is made up of multiple normal english words.

I don't even have any examples of such names yet because while I have the concept of a world in which names are supposed to be very directly and unambiguously meaningful, I haven't come up with one yet that doesn't completely fail a basic "Hello, my name is" test

Basically, how do I break English name rules without it sounding 110% fucked up?

  • Dolores [love/loves]
    cake
    ·
    1 year ago

    you'd be shocked what you can get used to. The Culture books have Minds with phrase-names that integrate seamlessly with plain english

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah but normal people are going to look at you weird when you introduce yourself as "so much for subtlety hyde-smith" or "Very little gravitas indeed williams"

    • booty [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      1 year ago

      Hmm, that sounds like a good start. Any chance you could give an example of these names being used in normal English sentences without it sounding all fucked up?

      I guess maybe phrases-as-names only sound completely fucked up to me while I'm trying to write them, and that if I just suck it up and write the story they'll still read as names to someone going in without expectations.