I had a pleasant chat this morning with Seabury alumna Susie Shaefer, in the course of which I revisted her blog and noted the “How Many Of You Are There?” quiz. Curiosity got the better of me, and I learned that there seem to be 37 people named “Andrew Adam” in the U.S.A. It’s a good thing I have a distinctive nickname, although when I entered it, I got the unsettling news that “There are 0 people in the U.S. with the first name Akma.”
Susie pointed out that it isn’t really a “first” name, since it encompasses my first and last names by initial, to which I eagerly shot back, “It’s a mononym!” Susie and I were hoping that I had hit upon a hitherto undiscovered word, and Susie noted that it did not appear in either of the online dictioneries she consulted — but I quickly found it in the Dictionary of Difficult Words. While I would have enjoyed the glory of having invented the term, I am nonetheless pleased to be able to say of myself, “I’m mononymous.”