You can hardly be held responsible...

...for being given a bad name at birth or coming from a family with a history of bad names, but you don't have to perpetuate this objectionable practice.

Take K. Dun Gifford, for example. He died last week at age 71 and his obit in the Times says he was:

...a bon vivant and a sometime restaurateur who traveled with gregarious ease in social circles of the famous and accomplished, and he had plenty of stories to tell.

(I wonder if my obit will read like that some day.)

The "K" in K. Dun Gifford stood for Kilvert, which was his mother's maiden name. It also explains why he went by the name "Dun." (I've often wondered why parents would give their children a first name like Kilvert only to call them something else. If they intended to call him "Dun," why didn't they save the trouble and give him that name in the first place? Maybe he started out as Kilvert and all the kids in the playground called him "Kill" for short. I can just imagine him getting his friends all together one day and asking them, "From now on, how about you guys just call me 'Dun?' ")

And it's not like Dun was a big improvement, either. How do you suppose he introduced himself at cocktail parties?

"Hi, I'm Dun."

"You're done? What do you mean, you're done?"

"I mean my name is Dun."

"Your first name is Done?"

"No. My first name is actually Kil--. Never mind."

Gifford's father's first name was Clarence and his mother's Priscilla. His sister was also named Priscilla and his brothers were named Charles and John. (He must have wondered from time to time how he got stuck with Kilvert.)

"Okay, okay, we're off to a bad start, here," he may have thought as a young man. So what does Gifford do? First he marries a woman named Gladys and then has a son, whom they name Kilvert Dun, Jr. He must have figured it was hopeless by that point, because he then went on to have two more sons, Arnold and Clarence.