Help me with my homework

[liv]

Here's a challenge for you: can you suggest me some names, which meet the following criteria:

• Plausible for actual people (ie not sounding like a spammer)
• Not really obvious defaults or clichés like "John Smith"
• Not similar to any famous person or fictional character
• Reasonably easy to spell and make a guess at the pronunciation
• Not rude or comical
• Plausible for someone from a different ethnic background from your own
• If you're feeling really ambitious, I could do with names that sound plausible for children, middle-aged people, and elderly people.

The reason I'm asking is that one of my jobs for the summer is to help write a bunch of case studies and exam questions, and we always, always struggle with the names. We try to get a balance of implied ethnic backgrounds, (and a range of ages and genders is necessary because it's often medically relevant) but we usually end up with way too many variants on things like "Robert Johnson" and "Mary Barker". It's actually surprisingly difficult to come up with names, so what I'm aiming to do is make a list that we can select from, so that we don't keep getting bogged down in inventing names for our imaginary doctors and patients.

Comments

[lavendersparkle]

Luxmi Patel
Fatima Hamoudi
Mohammed Barker
Priya Bhallah
Tahir Mahmood

(I'm doing this by thinking of people I went to school with/TV characters and mixing the first and last names of two with a similar ethnicity or just thinking of some of the most common names of people with different ethnicities to my own.)

[liv]

Good strategy, thank you. I'm a bit scared to mix and match in case I get spammer names, or accidentally mix Muslim first names with Hindu surnames (not that that never happens, but the point is that the names shouldn't be distracting or look odd). But those look like a good set for Asians, at least to my uneducated eye.

[lavendersparkle]

I was a bit worried too, but I figured if the names were from different regions they could always be 3rd/4th generationers whose parents met in the UK. Barker isn't a particularly Asian or Muslim name, but there are plenty of Muslim men whose fathers converted or whose parents changed their name to be a bit more English sounding.

[lavendersparkle]

I mixed the names up a bit, but could you not just use names of random people you met a decade ago. I doubt it would be libellous.

[liv]

Oh yes, I can totally do that, and I'll add some of my own to the list. But I wanted to use the power of the internet to get people from a wider range of backgrounds than just me. Especially as most of my colleagues come from similar backgrounds, which is precisely why we're struggling to make a balanced list.