Every year, the wonderful people behind Name of the Year cast aside their NCAA Tournament brackets to coordinate a competition that pits funny names of real people against one another. In their own words:

Name of the Year was founded in 1983 on an Ivy League campus. Its mission has remained unchanged: to discover, verify, nominate, elect and disseminate great names. All names included here are, to the best of our knowledge, real. No malice is intended.

Organized in a spirit of innocent fun, NOTY revels in the sheer joy of  funny-sounding, confusing, or ludicrous names. This year’s tournament includes competitors like Vernon Lee Bad Marriage Jr., Ulysses Castro, Stonegarden Grindlife, and presumptive front-runner Courvoisier Winetavius Richardson. (You can find the entire bracket here.) There’s even a “Hall of Name” for the all-time greats: Assumption Bulltron, Tokyo Sexwale, Jew Don Boney Jr. and their illustrious peers.



Below, I have included my own nominations for the Bullblog’s inaugural Name of the Year tournament, culled from Yale faculty and administration. We urge you to submit your own nominees in the comments thread by tomorrow, when we will allow Bullblog readers to vote for their favorite name at Yale. On Friday, we will name a champion.

Rules: No students, no malice, just Yale faculty or staff and their wonderfully weird names. Please submit full names along with their respective posts at Yale.

Bullblog Nominees

Pericles Lewis — Professor of English & Comparative Literature

Ana L. De La O — Assistant Professor of Political Science

Bloomstaff — Sterling Professor of Humanities

Alastair Minnis — Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of English

Zoltán Gendler Szabó — Professor  of Philosophy of Language and Metaphysics

Alec Stone Sweet — Leitner Professor of International Law, Politics and International Studies

Howard V. Zonana — Professor of Psychiatry and Clinical Professor (Adjunct) of Law

Monique Boney — Secretary, Department of Philosophy