What is it like to have the same first name as your last name?

Not that big a deal, although I think it’s meant I’m not as emotionally attached to my surname as I could have been. (I’m more attached to the “Dr.” 🙂 The surname hasn’t been in the family that long anyway.

The jokes I hear when I’m introduced to people get old pretty quick, so I roll my eyes and move on. Last few years, I’ve been preempting them by coopting the New York saying: They liked me so much, they named me twice. And before that, I’d make a point of saying that I have three cousins with the same name. (Greek Cypriot naming practices: father’s patronymic as surname, and grandfather’s name as given name.)

Star Trek (creative franchise): How do I go about learning Klingon?

Once I’d gotten the grammar down, I found that vocabulary stuck in my head through lots of dictionary lookup while translating text into Klingon. (With disuse, of course, it goes away again…) Because of the relative lack of source texts, I found that a useful technique.