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

[simont]

ie not sounding like a spammer

Aww, you mean you're not tempted to sneak in just one Indescribable Q. Birdbath? :-)

[liv]

I'm extremely tempted, yes. But the main aim here is to be bland and non-distracting, without being totally generic to the point of cliché. The idea is that the students should concentrate on the details of the case, not titter because their imaginary patient is named Poon (we used that during our open day for teenagers, and it was a disaster), or get stuck on a name that they can't (mentally) pronounce.

[delight]

... Can I use that name in a play?

[simont]

I doubt the spam community can exercise any meaningful IP rights over it :-)

[khalinche]

I'm quite taken with that, actually. If I end up naming my firstborn so, it will be your fault.