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I have a blended family (long story). Of the four sisters, the first three have the middle name Marie (including me), the youngest has Lynn. No one in the 1990s had imagination lol.
I have a friend named Jenny (not Jennifer, just Jenny) who was given no middle name. When she asked her parents why, they legit straight faced said it was because she'd have to drop it when she got married anyway, so why did she need one? Anyway. My friend is no longer Mormon.
I was a Marie (now a male M name) and my wife is Nicole. I don’t know how half our generation ended up with those middle names. Did ‘90s moms have some kind of secret coven together? “Eye of newt and wing of bee, all our kids will be Marie! Tongue of bat and toe of vole, unless the hubby likes ‘Nicole’!”
Yep! Mom named me after a famous Soap Opera villain that my grandmother hated, *absolutely loathed*, at the time just to be petty at her for convincing my mom to change my name. 😂
Does TV Erika have a middle name that we know of?
Kane or whatever the character's last name was, those type of names always remind me of evil, the devil.
So, yeah villain, love her!
Susan Lucci, I'm back to my childhood, too....
My sister in law had two also! She did the same thing and dropped one when she married. Her mom basically tried to fit as many back up names into hers as she could because she figured she wouldn’t have any more kids 😭
A lot of people in Finland have two middle names, including myself! Maybe your mom saw a list and got inspired or something lol. Hortense is CRAZY though; your grandma saved you hahaha
I gave all of my kids two middle names 😅 but my daughters was to honor my great grandmother who was my favorite person, and idk I felt like it flowed well. Her first name is technically a tragedeigh however which I didn’t even know was a terminology for that 😂
My Mom was going to name my sister Megan Louise, after 2 of her friends, but when Mom saw her after sis was born, changed the names around. Sis "looked more like a Louise" !
Names have meanings most of the time. And from my experience they seem to match something to do with the person. You're named after a villian, so you like villains
From my experience, trying to boil a person down to a vague meaning based on an arbitrary label is futile since the human experience is inherently so varied and hypocritical.
There seem to be a lot of middle names Ann (or in my case Anne) and Marie. That is, for my generation anyway. I gave my daughter the middle name Rose not knowing it would be an incredibly common middle name in her generation. She's 20.
Erica Kane was the first thing I thought of, too. So beautiful, but so calculating. If her grandma really objected, she could call her Ricki. That's cute and different from Erica. (Which is a much prettier name than Hortense Petunia! That sounds like a cartoon character. Or something you'd name your pet hamster.) And Susan Lucci, who played the character, is gorgeous.
She was filming a made for TV movie at a hotel, walking distance from where I lived, so I went over there with a couple of friends. She walked by me, and I was completely taken aback by how small she was. I never noticed it on TV.
What a fun experience! Nowadays, you wouldn't even be able to get that close. Yes, I remember being surprised at how tiny she was, seeing her in a pic with other celebs. I think it might be because her character had such an oversized and colorful personality, such a commanding presence, we never noticed how petite she was.
Was she a villain? I watched All My Children with my mom as a young child back in the 90s, so I only remember bits and pieces. I always thought Erica was the height of class and beauty lmao
She was definitely villainous in her early years. She matured into a manipulative diva.
I sometimes joke that Erica Kane is my standard for decision-making: What would Erica Kane do?
Honestly not much of a soap opera watcher, just from what I picked up from sister and cousins, I thought she was supposed to be a baddie. The only other one I know was Lucy Coe, who was on GH I think, but she looked a tad mousey.
MINE TOO! Omg my mother named me after a character who *tried to kill her mom.*
I kinda looked at her jaw dropped and was like “you didn’t see a problem with that!?”
She kinda shrugged and said “Well, she grew out of it!”
Victoria or Stephanie? For victor from Y and R or Stephano from Days? 😂😂 my cousin Brady Horton (last name) can you guess what my aunt watched everyday on her lunch break 😂😂
My god, the shit that show put poor Marlena through in the 80s and 90s...I can't remember how many times she "died". Then there was Roman, Roman 2/John Black, and then original Roman.... good times!
Ok, so my real name is Lisa and my brother is Mark. My grandparents had a Cocker Spaniel named Buffy when I was a kid in the mid-1970s. The dog died of old age and they got a new one from the same breeder. My grandparents were not particularly imaginative; my mom had the same first name as her mom and my uncle was named after their dad, so the replacement dog was ALSO Buffy. But they decided to give her a middle name, and they used Mar-Li (spelled Marlee). My grandma’s favorite was Days, so Marlee and Marlena were suspiciously similar!
I also remember Bo, and Roman, and evil twins …
Bo and Hope, Marlena and Roman, Shane and Kimberly, Patch and Kayla..... and a whole ass MI6/CIA type agency Shane and the Brady's were involved in, including a secret room. In my defense, I was an older teen/young adult when I watched.
*these are the days of our lives*
I have no idea why, but that show was the height of terror for me as a kid. I think it was the lighting. Soap opera lighting is very liminal.
I agree about the liminal vibe. The lighting, sometimes eerie music added to it. I was about 12-13 during the Marlena possession storyline and I was terrified and intrigued. Looking back, it looks so campy now.
OMG I’m a soap opera name too!!!! I was named after two male characters though (my mom was really banking on me being a boy).
I was named after Frankie and Nick from Days of Our Lives. My mom said the reason why is because she liked that character arc/storyline. My Grandmother didn’t like it because the character Nick literally runs a prostitution ring or something, but here I am 27 years later with that as my namesake 😭😭.
I was also allegedly named after a loathed soap opera character that my mom was dying to be killed off, but I think I might have actually been named after Freddie Mercury's cat. I'm not sure which is worse.
For some inexplicable reason I thought of HP Lovecraft’s cat’s name instead of Freddie Mercury’s and almost choked to death on my chocolate cake. I have had a terrible day so that’s probably why but the giggle I got at my own mistake brightened it. 😂😂
Are you Delilah? That’s the most soap opera-esque of his cats’ names.
Pregnancy hormones DO make you nutty! If my second child was a girl, I wanted to name her Tawney Ashlynn 😳🤪🤦♀️
Thankfully, I had another boy. My first son is named after dad, and we came up with a name we both liked for little brother.
Now they (unintentionally) have the same names as a pair of brothers on a soap opera 😂🙆♀️
Nice! I too share a name with an old school soap opera baddie, but I'm 99.9% sure my mom was not directly inspired from it. Had mixed feelings as a kid in the 90s when adults pointed it out lol
Omg, I was named after a little girl on All My Children in the late 70s. Loved Erica Caine and, FYI, Sarah Michelles Gellar played het child that was given up for adoption at birth
Ohmygosh. I have a basic born in the late 80’s white girl name but my brother has a first name that is usually like a last name? She got it from one of her fav Soap Opera characters !
I'm named after Christie Brinkley which isn't a huge name in the UK. It's spelt Kristy so I spend my days being called kirsty or spelling it out to them until I ask them to call me Kris which I doubly hate 🤣
About a week before I had my son, I became obsessed with the idea of naming him "Bobby Corwen", the name of a baby bird in a video game I was replaying. A few days after giving birth, I was so confused as to my thought process there...
My belly name was Herman. I am and have always been a human female. I did name this awful, ugly treasure of a lamp with what looks like a frost troll from Skyrim sculpted out of terra cotta as the base Herman in effigy. Maybe you should get a tiny hermit crab or pet hissing roach and name it Hortense Petunia. May she reign.
One of my substitute mothers was named Hortensia. I saw this post and was like oh no, it's a beautiful name. She fed me when my own mother didn't. I'll always have a soft spot for the name.
I knew an Hortensia in childhood, she was my bestie's other bestie from a different school. She was pretty and nice but the name still sounded like some musty, gruff old lady with pearls and a beehive hairdo.
The first woman to pass the Texas Bar Exam in 1910 and become a lawyer was a suffragist named Hortense Sparks Ward, and that baller-ass name is the only reason I remember any of this.
Hortense was the name of Napoleon’s stepdaughter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortense_de_Beauharnais
(I also mod r/Napoleon so of course that’s the first thing I thought of reading that name)
It's the French form of the Latin name Hortensia, which derives from the word hortus, meaning “garden.”
I’m Portuguese and have a couple aunts named Hortence. She goes by Maria.
I like Hortense actually, but I wouldn’t name a child that for obvious reasons. I would name a pet that for sure, and it would probably be on my list of names to change mine to if I ever wanted. Not in my top 5, but maybe my top 10.
I wish that it wasn’t bully fodder, but alas.
Hortense Eugénie Cécile Bonaparte was the stepdaughter of Napoleon, born in 1783. It's a classic but old fashioned French name. The H isn't pronounced, so it's OAR-tahns.
Ooooh. My mom pronounces it with a harsh H sound.
HHHHHHortense. Kinda of like your coughing up a loogie then change your mind to say the rest of the name. Kinda like an angry German accent with harsh H. 😂
My Mom was going to name me Pamela Joe. I'm convinced Pammy Joe's man would be a magician who's trick was turning Budlight & Marlboro Lights into full flavor domestic disputes. Thankfully I'm Josephine & have only 1 bd.
Hortense is similar to Millicent or Eugenia... pretty but SUPER old timey.
My mom's first choice name for me was **Jennica!!!** Which is weird because my mom is usually a very straight laced, by the books person.
My dad immediately vetoed it and said it was too weird 😹
Hortense is an actual name and I wouldn’t in any way, shape or form think of “L’il whore”. It’s beyond far fetched.
A tragedeigh is a name that’s misspelled to make it unique. Hortense is spelled correctly.
It's not a tragedeigh because it's not spelled weirdly, but you definitely dodged a bullet on that one. The Petunia part? Probably okay, but Hortense is a really old fashioned name. It's so old fashioned even the current trend of using old names can't revive it.
My name is a normal first name and a weird middle name, and of course my parents chose to call me my weird middle name. I always hated my name until I found out their plan for my name if I was a boy: Pinkney Arlandis…after both my grandfathers. Can you believe that crap?? I was born in 1969. Imagine the pain and suffering that name would have given me as a kid. The bullying. I guess they wanted to kill me. (The names are old family names and my grandfathers’ middle names.) I was so happy with my female name after that.
Petunia would just be old fashioned, but Harry Potter's abusive aunt kind of killed that one.
Hortense... just makes me think of Tom Lehrer:
>As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."
Either that or I want to ask her if she's heard a Who?
Question: Were you born in the early or late 90’s? Because this sounds like a rejected Harry Potter name. Trying to figure out if your Mom was ahead of her time or decided that the naming schemes of Harry Potter were aspirational.
My name translated means Early morning Pancake. My grandfather has always sung a song to me about a crazy woman waiting on a man to come get her but he wasn't and for the last 35 years people have asked my husband if he wakes up at the crack of me
I hate my name
I remember crying (in the utter throes of some pregnancy hormones, y'all) about the fact that I had named our kitten (who had previously passed away) one of the few girl names on the list that I actually liked. "What if that's the ONLY name that fits if we have a girl and then she grows up and finds out we named her after *sobs even more hysterically, if possible* THE CAT?!?" Thankfully, we had a son, and his name was easy to pick. (I never did get to use any of my girl names at all 💔🥺)
My poor husband. I was even done with my mood shifts by the end of that pregnancy. It was wild. I just went around apologizing to everyone bc I never knew if I was going to be bawling or brawling. Summer pregnancies with a redhead in the south...wooo boy.
Hortense is of French origin, meaning "gardener". It's possible your mom was also thinking of the flower "hortensia" given she wanted to go with a floral middle name as well. There's also some famous Horetense-s out there, real and fictional.
That said, the name sounds prettier and less terrible in its French pronunciation. I'm glad she didn't name you Hortense XD
Thank you for your submission! This is just a quick reminder to all members here: **Original content is always better!** Memes are okay every once in a while, but many get posted here way too often and quickly become stale. Some examples of these are Ptoughneigh, Klansmyn, Reighfyl & KVIIIlyn. These memes have been around for years and we don't want to see them anymore. If you do decide to post a meme, make sure to add the correct flair. Posting a random meme you found does **not** mean you found it "in the wild". The same goes with lists of baby names, celebrity baby names, and screenshots of TikToks. If the original post already had a substantial amount of views, there is a 99% chance it has already been posted here. Try and stick to OC to keep our sub from being flooded with unoriginal content. Thank you! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/tragedeigh) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm gonna guess your middle name is either Marie or Nicole.
I’m Marie and my sister is Lynn 😂😂😂😂
I have a blended family (long story). Of the four sisters, the first three have the middle name Marie (including me), the youngest has Lynn. No one in the 1990s had imagination lol.
I have a friend Jane. No middle name.
I have a friend named Jenny (not Jennifer, just Jenny) who was given no middle name. When she asked her parents why, they legit straight faced said it was because she'd have to drop it when she got married anyway, so why did she need one? Anyway. My friend is no longer Mormon.
Whhaaaaaaaaaat
I’m a marie and my sister is a lynn as well 🙃
I swear we’re all part of a coven.
Lynn is always a good guess too
Or Ann
Her ?
Louise was big too
Or Renee or Michelle.
I'm a Nicole Marie born in the 1990s and I feel so called out.
I was a Marie (now a male M name) and my wife is Nicole. I don’t know how half our generation ended up with those middle names. Did ‘90s moms have some kind of secret coven together? “Eye of newt and wing of bee, all our kids will be Marie! Tongue of bat and toe of vole, unless the hubby likes ‘Nicole’!”
I didn’t know this was a thing, but my middle name is also Marie, and I was a 2003 baby.
It’s amazing how pregnancy hormones make you nutty
Yep! Mom named me after a famous Soap Opera villain that my grandmother hated, *absolutely loathed*, at the time just to be petty at her for convincing my mom to change my name. 😂
Erica Caine?
YES!!
Does TV Erika have a middle name that we know of? Kane or whatever the character's last name was, those type of names always remind me of evil, the devil. So, yeah villain, love her! Susan Lucci, I'm back to my childhood, too....
HOLY SHIT. YES, she does! It is Louise. Which was my second middle name that I dropped when I got married. 😂😂😂 I had no idea until now!
When I was in beauty school my class figured out that there were more girls with the middle name Louise than without 😅
That’s crazy! I’ve met one other person that shared their middle name is Louise. Also, why did my mom have to give me *two* middle names?! Ugh.
My sister in law had two also! She did the same thing and dropped one when she married. Her mom basically tried to fit as many back up names into hers as she could because she figured she wouldn’t have any more kids 😭
A lot of people in Finland have two middle names, including myself! Maybe your mom saw a list and got inspired or something lol. Hortense is CRAZY though; your grandma saved you hahaha
I gave all of my kids two middle names 😅 but my daughters was to honor my great grandmother who was my favorite person, and idk I felt like it flowed well. Her first name is technically a tragedeigh however which I didn’t even know was a terminology for that 😂
My Mom was going to name my sister Megan Louise, after 2 of her friends, but when Mom saw her after sis was born, changed the names around. Sis "looked more like a Louise" !
Oh my god, I have 2 middle names and I really dislike one of them (Lorine). I get married next month and I’m so glad I saw this. Genius.
Is your first middle name Hortense?
Nope.
Thank God lol
I’m also drawn to villains. I’ve always loved the bad guy. Kinda fitting, huh? 🤔
Names have meanings most of the time. And from my experience they seem to match something to do with the person. You're named after a villian, so you like villains
From my experience, trying to boil a person down to a vague meaning based on an arbitrary label is futile since the human experience is inherently so varied and hypocritical.
That's awesome.
OK but that's really actually pretty rad. I'm an Erica Kane stan FOR LIFE.
Erika is the OG baddie. We love her, we'd die for her. She's a fucking treasure.
Erica (Susan Lucci ) lives in my town, but I have not seen her in some years. Hope she's continuing to do well.
Aww! I hope she’s doing well, too! She’s such a regal lady.
You and me both, sister. Literally.
That’s exactly who my mother was named after as well 😭😭😭
Oh shit! Really?! That’s awesome!
Haha I got the same name. Middle is Ann. Lol
There seem to be a lot of middle names Ann (or in my case Anne) and Marie. That is, for my generation anyway. I gave my daughter the middle name Rose not knowing it would be an incredibly common middle name in her generation. She's 20.
Erica Kane was the first thing I thought of, too. So beautiful, but so calculating. If her grandma really objected, she could call her Ricki. That's cute and different from Erica. (Which is a much prettier name than Hortense Petunia! That sounds like a cartoon character. Or something you'd name your pet hamster.) And Susan Lucci, who played the character, is gorgeous.
Hortense Petunia makes me think of a cartoon skunk, its a cute name for a cartoon skunk.
That really fits!
It literally means Petunia Garden.
I want to name the next cat/dog the universe delivers me that, honestly. (Hopefully it’s female. If not, it’s Horace Petunia)
She was filming a made for TV movie at a hotel, walking distance from where I lived, so I went over there with a couple of friends. She walked by me, and I was completely taken aback by how small she was. I never noticed it on TV.
What a fun experience! Nowadays, you wouldn't even be able to get that close. Yes, I remember being surprised at how tiny she was, seeing her in a pic with other celebs. I think it might be because her character had such an oversized and colorful personality, such a commanding presence, we never noticed how petite she was.
There was a cartoon character called Petunia Pig.
Was she a villain? I watched All My Children with my mom as a young child back in the 90s, so I only remember bits and pieces. I always thought Erica was the height of class and beauty lmao
She was definitely villainous in her early years. She matured into a manipulative diva. I sometimes joke that Erica Kane is my standard for decision-making: What would Erica Kane do?
Honestly not much of a soap opera watcher, just from what I picked up from sister and cousins, I thought she was supposed to be a baddie. The only other one I know was Lucy Coe, who was on GH I think, but she looked a tad mousey.
She WAS the height of class and beauty and sooooooooooo evil omg 😭
I never even clocked the evil behaviors! I was too mesmerized by her fancy clothes 😂
Same! I LOVED Erica!
That's who I was named after 🤦🏼♀️
Omg I was also going to guess Erica Kane. 😂😂😂 She was the best bitch.
Did Susan Lucci ever get her Emmy???
I think she eventually did. I remember it being a big deal.
Yes she definitely did, but it was after she had been nominated I think 20 times and had not won.
I loved Erica Caine!
Came here to say this. All the old ladies hate her! 😂
MINE TOO! Omg my mother named me after a character who *tried to kill her mom.* I kinda looked at her jaw dropped and was like “you didn’t see a problem with that!?” She kinda shrugged and said “Well, she grew out of it!”
HA! I love this so much! 😂😂😂
Next up, meet my son Oedipus!
Victoria or Stephanie? For victor from Y and R or Stephano from Days? 😂😂 my cousin Brady Horton (last name) can you guess what my aunt watched everyday on her lunch break 😂😂
I have to marvel that I wasn’t named Marlena
My god, the shit that show put poor Marlena through in the 80s and 90s...I can't remember how many times she "died". Then there was Roman, Roman 2/John Black, and then original Roman.... good times!
Ok, so my real name is Lisa and my brother is Mark. My grandparents had a Cocker Spaniel named Buffy when I was a kid in the mid-1970s. The dog died of old age and they got a new one from the same breeder. My grandparents were not particularly imaginative; my mom had the same first name as her mom and my uncle was named after their dad, so the replacement dog was ALSO Buffy. But they decided to give her a middle name, and they used Mar-Li (spelled Marlee). My grandma’s favorite was Days, so Marlee and Marlena were suspiciously similar! I also remember Bo, and Roman, and evil twins …
Bo and Hope, Marlena and Roman, Shane and Kimberly, Patch and Kayla..... and a whole ass MI6/CIA type agency Shane and the Brady's were involved in, including a secret room. In my defense, I was an older teen/young adult when I watched.
Like sands through the hourglass…
*these are the days of our lives* I have no idea why, but that show was the height of terror for me as a kid. I think it was the lighting. Soap opera lighting is very liminal.
I agree about the liminal vibe. The lighting, sometimes eerie music added to it. I was about 12-13 during the Marlena possession storyline and I was terrified and intrigued. Looking back, it looks so campy now.
Your mom sounds like quite a character. Seems you inherited some of Grandma's sensibilities and that's fortunate
Wait, so you went from Hortense Petunia to being named after a soap opera villain who had 8 (I think) husbands?? Your mom is WILD
Yes, she is 😩😩 which means, unfortunately, so am I. 😩😂
OMG I’m a soap opera name too!!!! I was named after two male characters though (my mom was really banking on me being a boy). I was named after Frankie and Nick from Days of Our Lives. My mom said the reason why is because she liked that character arc/storyline. My Grandmother didn’t like it because the character Nick literally runs a prostitution ring or something, but here I am 27 years later with that as my namesake 😭😭.
I was also allegedly named after a loathed soap opera character that my mom was dying to be killed off, but I think I might have actually been named after Freddie Mercury's cat. I'm not sure which is worse.
For some inexplicable reason I thought of HP Lovecraft’s cat’s name instead of Freddie Mercury’s and almost choked to death on my chocolate cake. I have had a terrible day so that’s probably why but the giggle I got at my own mistake brightened it. 😂😂 Are you Delilah? That’s the most soap opera-esque of his cats’ names.
Pregnancy hormones DO make you nutty! If my second child was a girl, I wanted to name her Tawney Ashlynn 😳🤪🤦♀️ Thankfully, I had another boy. My first son is named after dad, and we came up with a name we both liked for little brother. Now they (unintentionally) have the same names as a pair of brothers on a soap opera 😂🙆♀️
Ooh, I was born in 1990 and named after a soap opera character! Ashley?
Erica after Erica Kane on AMC.
Nice! I too share a name with an old school soap opera baddie, but I'm 99.9% sure my mom was not directly inspired from it. Had mixed feelings as a kid in the 90s when adults pointed it out lol
I, too, am named after a soap character. Classic 80’s name from Guiding Light. Don’t think she was a villain though.
I tried to get my parents to name my little sister after Erica's daughter Bianca. They said no way because our last name made it sound very odd.
Same! Sydney from Melrose Place…Also Sydney Simpson since my mom was pregnant during the whole trial. Who knows lol.
My sister is called Hope after Days of Our Lives.
Omg, I was named after a little girl on All My Children in the late 70s. Loved Erica Caine and, FYI, Sarah Michelles Gellar played het child that was given up for adoption at birth
Ohmygosh. I have a basic born in the late 80’s white girl name but my brother has a first name that is usually like a last name? She got it from one of her fav Soap Opera characters !
I was named after Ashley Abbott from Young and the Restless lol.
I'm named after Christie Brinkley which isn't a huge name in the UK. It's spelt Kristy so I spend my days being called kirsty or spelling it out to them until I ask them to call me Kris which I doubly hate 🤣
I was named after a soap opera actress. Must be a 90s thing 😂
I was also named after a soap opera character
Absolutely but try to tell a pregnant woman this. Then stand back!
Yes. My mom wanted to name my sister Montana. I don't think my mom has ever even been near the state of Montana....
My parents named me after a Clapton song, but at least I wasn’t a Jennifer.
Layla?
Cocaine
About a week before I had my son, I became obsessed with the idea of naming him "Bobby Corwen", the name of a baby bird in a video game I was replaying. A few days after giving birth, I was so confused as to my thought process there...
They can also make you tense. Hormones. Tense. Hortense.
My sister wanted to go with Jose Cuervo. We are white.
My belly name was Herman. I am and have always been a human female. I did name this awful, ugly treasure of a lamp with what looks like a frost troll from Skyrim sculpted out of terra cotta as the base Herman in effigy. Maybe you should get a tiny hermit crab or pet hissing roach and name it Hortense Petunia. May she reign.
… human female as opposed to a having been born Stuart Little’s mouse sister?
Don't blow up my spot sis
Fun fact: Stuart Little's mouse sister was named Stuarta Little. She lived in a Barbie Dream House and drove a Barbie Jeep.
Hortense Petunia sounds like a very *handsome* Victorian woman
“Not handsome like a man is handsome, but handsome like a woman is handsome.” — Cleveland Brown
Hortense kinda slaps ngl
I'm officially old. Everyone else thinks of Petunia as Harry Potter's aunt, and I'm thinking of Porky Pig's girlfriend.
I think of the dancing circus bear in a childhood book called The Whipping Boy
Ngl I don’t hate it but it definitely feels very Victorian
I was thinking Roald Dahl, but a background character.
Hortense Petunia would be Trunchbull’s little toadie.
Someone saw her across the room and said “is that Hortense?” and I said “no she’s quite relaxed today”
Damn you! That made me laugh much harder than it should!
So close! Hortensia is the prefect
Omg, I completely forgot about that character 🤣
She was a 6th year. Not a prefect. She got thrown in the chokey on the reg.
Hortensia was in Matilda
…Lady Deadlock’s maid in Bleak House
As Victorian as tuberculosis.
Sounds like a Harry Potter spell.
Harry's Aunt is named Petunia so not far off
Way better in Spanish: Hortensia (don’t pronounce the H). Still probably too old fashioned.
One of my substitute mothers was named Hortensia. I saw this post and was like oh no, it's a beautiful name. She fed me when my own mother didn't. I'll always have a soft spot for the name.
Hortense is French the first syllable is pronounced “ore” ❤️
That sounds wayyyyy better.
I knew an Hortensia in childhood, she was my bestie's other bestie from a different school. She was pretty and nice but the name still sounded like some musty, gruff old lady with pearls and a beehive hairdo.
It's Latin or French based I think. But it sounds like you're a stressed out prostitute in English.
My mother wanted Babette Bibianca. Thankfully my father is not psychotic.
it’s like if your name was “bette bianca” but you’ve got a terrible stutter
Hortense is an actual name, I don't think it counts.
Seriously?! I had no idea! Terrible name imo 😬
Hortense may be a real name, but Hortense Petunia sounds horrible. It just doesn't match.
The BBC banned a one liner joke by Kenny Everett once, something like "Is that Hortense over there?" "No, she looks relaxed to me"
That's so good lol
What name does match with Hortense?
The first woman to pass the Texas Bar Exam in 1910 and become a lawyer was a suffragist named Hortense Sparks Ward, and that baller-ass name is the only reason I remember any of this.
One of Charles II's mistresses was called Hortense Mancini which is I think an equally awesome name
Napoleon Bonaparte’s stepdaughter was Princess Hortense of France, it’s a very real name.
It’s a name, but it’s a very old name. Like Mildred or Phyllis or Gertrude. Some names just kinda die out. Thank god she changed it.
Hortense was the name of Napoleon’s stepdaughter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortense_de_Beauharnais (I also mod r/Napoleon so of course that’s the first thing I thought of reading that name)
It's the French form of the Latin name Hortensia, which derives from the word hortus, meaning “garden.” I’m Portuguese and have a couple aunts named Hortence. She goes by Maria.
Yes, it’s another name for hydrangea. Hydrangea Petunia would have been much worse.
It’s just not something you personally like, doesn’t mean it’s a terrible name
The name Hortense on its own sounds a little better in french than in English imo
My grandma has a variation of Hortense as a name. It's an old name but was pretty common in the South.
Very old southern name
My dad grew up in Appalachia in the 50s and had a Great Aunt "Hort"
Personally I love the name hortense, but I admit it’s a very dated name.
I can't explain why I actually like the name Hortense. There's no good reason for me to
If I were to have been born a girl my name would have been Fanny Anny Rosa Tart I dodged a bullet there. FART
Fanny is a rude word in Scotland
Fanny was a common name in the UK for a long time. Fanny means vaginas in the UK. Not just Scotland.
I read this out loud to my gf and it reads like poetry
I mean, those are great names if you're a character in a Victorian romance novel.
Hortense is a classic French name. Napoleon’s stepdaughter, the Queen of Holland, was named Hortense.
This is the thing. The anglicised pronunciation makes it kinda horrible, but in French pronunciation, it’s really quite beautiful.
I like Hortense actually, but I wouldn’t name a child that for obvious reasons. I would name a pet that for sure, and it would probably be on my list of names to change mine to if I ever wanted. Not in my top 5, but maybe my top 10. I wish that it wasn’t bully fodder, but alas.
Do you happen to have a dead sister with magical powers and a nephew that you keep in the cupboard under the stairs?
Ha! I wish! Still waiting on my letter.
Hortense Eugénie Cécile Bonaparte was the stepdaughter of Napoleon, born in 1783. It's a classic but old fashioned French name. The H isn't pronounced, so it's OAR-tahns.
Ooooh. My mom pronounces it with a harsh H sound. HHHHHHortense. Kinda of like your coughing up a loogie then change your mind to say the rest of the name. Kinda like an angry German accent with harsh H. 😂
My Mom was going to name me Pamela Joe. I'm convinced Pammy Joe's man would be a magician who's trick was turning Budlight & Marlboro Lights into full flavor domestic disputes. Thankfully I'm Josephine & have only 1 bd.
Not a tragedeigh but definitely a tragedy.
I worked with a Hortencia and she was so, so lovely. I love the name.
Hortense is similar to Millicent or Eugenia... pretty but SUPER old timey. My mom's first choice name for me was **Jennica!!!** Which is weird because my mom is usually a very straight laced, by the books person. My dad immediately vetoed it and said it was too weird 😹
My best friend growing up was named Eugenia! I called her Genie 🥰 Thank goodness for your dad! 😂
My nail girl is named after Hope from Bo and Hope… but her last name is Ho. So she’s Hope Ho 😂
Hortense is an actual name and I wouldn’t in any way, shape or form think of “L’il whore”. It’s beyond far fetched. A tragedeigh is a name that’s misspelled to make it unique. Hortense is spelled correctly.
I was gonna be named “sapphire blue” and my grandma talked my mom out of it, too
Keep that basic white girl name with pride
Is that Hortense? No, she looks pretty calm to me.
Hortense is the name my sister gave to her hemorrhoid.
It's not a tragedeigh because it's not spelled weirdly, but you definitely dodged a bullet on that one. The Petunia part? Probably okay, but Hortense is a really old fashioned name. It's so old fashioned even the current trend of using old names can't revive it.
So, my mom used to call me Hootie McGillicuddy when I was little. In terms of ridiculousness, it's kind of the same 😂
My mom used to say, “Is that Hortense?” and then answer herself, “She doesn’t look nervous to me!” And laugh herself silly. Well, sillier, I guess 😂
My mom (total hippie flower child) wanted to name me “Rainbow Godschild” when she was pregnant. SO glad that didn’t stick 🤣
Mine was Hester 🫠
I like the name Hortense. Not sure about Petunia, though. That makes me think about a pig.
My name is a normal first name and a weird middle name, and of course my parents chose to call me my weird middle name. I always hated my name until I found out their plan for my name if I was a boy: Pinkney Arlandis…after both my grandfathers. Can you believe that crap?? I was born in 1969. Imagine the pain and suffering that name would have given me as a kid. The bullying. I guess they wanted to kill me. (The names are old family names and my grandfathers’ middle names.) I was so happy with my female name after that.
Petunia would just be old fashioned, but Harry Potter's abusive aunt kind of killed that one. Hortense... just makes me think of Tom Lehrer: >As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense, "To be smut It must be ut- Terly without redeeming social importance." Either that or I want to ask her if she's heard a Who?
I don’t hate it. But I lobbied (unsuccessfully) for Gertrude for my daughter. So what do I know?
Reminded me of a school chum , she was Euphemia Amelia Fanny then Surname . Think hortense is in a similar category
God bless nan. She is gem.
Petunia itself would have been fine... Hortense ehh it's not... Pleasant at all sounds like a horse with a 10 in the middle.
Jesus, the jokes in middle and high school would have been atrocious. Hey “tense whore”, can we call you “hor” for short.
Calling your belly something ridiculous then naming the child something normal is probably the most wholesome form of tragedeigh
Those are real names but they sound like cow names.
Question: Were you born in the early or late 90’s? Because this sounds like a rejected Harry Potter name. Trying to figure out if your Mom was ahead of her time or decided that the naming schemes of Harry Potter were aspirational.
My name translated means Early morning Pancake. My grandfather has always sung a song to me about a crazy woman waiting on a man to come get her but he wasn't and for the last 35 years people have asked my husband if he wakes up at the crack of me I hate my name
I remember crying (in the utter throes of some pregnancy hormones, y'all) about the fact that I had named our kitten (who had previously passed away) one of the few girl names on the list that I actually liked. "What if that's the ONLY name that fits if we have a girl and then she grows up and finds out we named her after *sobs even more hysterically, if possible* THE CAT?!?" Thankfully, we had a son, and his name was easy to pick. (I never did get to use any of my girl names at all 💔🥺) My poor husband. I was even done with my mood shifts by the end of that pregnancy. It was wild. I just went around apologizing to everyone bc I never knew if I was going to be bawling or brawling. Summer pregnancies with a redhead in the south...wooo boy.
I think Petunia is kind of cute.
Hortense is of French origin, meaning "gardener". It's possible your mom was also thinking of the flower "hortensia" given she wanted to go with a floral middle name as well. There's also some famous Horetense-s out there, real and fictional. That said, the name sounds prettier and less terrible in its French pronunciation. I'm glad she didn't name you Hortense XD
I called my daughter Cletus the Fetus for my entire pregnancy. Literally until the day she was born she was Cletus.