Wikipedia has a list of names for generic/unknown people used in different countries. Apparently John Doe isn’t used much outside the U.S.
Some favorites: Don Nadie (”Sir Nobody”, Argentina), Marko Marković and Petar Petrović (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Jos Bleau (Quebec), Joe Borg (Malta), and Johnny Foreigner (UK).
I had a teacher in high school who would regularly use “Joe Bag-o’-donuts”, of which I am particularly fond.
On a side note, I think that with the right intonation, you can quite productively create new names like this - you just have to start with a generic first name (Joe/John/Jane) and then have a multi-syllabic last name, which sometimes (but not always) lends some of its meaning (e.g. Johnny Mailman refers to your generic, everyday mailman, but Joe Bag-o’-donuts doesn’t have anything to do with the fried circles).
Posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 5:18 pm. Categories: Linguistics, Interesting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “John Doe and Joe Bag-o’-donuts”
Marissa Says:
October 9th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
My grandfather always says “Joe Schmo from Kokomo,” and it always makes me giggle.
Danny Silverman Says:
October 9th, 2007 at 7:58 pm
Was your teacher named Maggie Balch?
Adrian Says:
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:13 pm
In Argentina we use “Don Nadie” when trying to emphatise that a certain person is not well-known, unimportant, or simply unknown. It’s usually derogatory and used is informal language only.
The equivalent of John Doe in Argentina would be N.N.
Example 1: “El cuerpo pertenence a un N.N.” (lit. “The corpse belongs to an N.N.”)
Example 2: “Llama a todos los hospitales y pide una lista de los N.N.” (lit. “Call all hospitals and ask for a list of all N.N.”)
I’m not really sure which term is used for legal matters such as plaintiffs, but certainly not “Don Nadie”
You can get more info at the wikipedia entry for “John Doe” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doe)
Adrian
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