29 March 2016

Potoooooooo

Potoooooooo or Pot-8-Os... was a famous 18th-century Thoroughbred racehorse, known for his defeat of some of the greatest racehorses of the time and his later life as an influential sire...

Pot-8-Os acquired the strange spelling of his nickname through a transliteration error, when a stable lad was asked to write the original name, "Potatoes", on a feed bin. The lad's version, Potoooooooo, was said to amuse his lordship so he kept it, and it appears in the General Stud Book.
There must be other names that could be reconfigured in a similar manner.  CCCPO (or would it be CPPPO?) comes to mind.  Readers can undoubtedly come up with others.


Today I learned:  "The term [Thoroughbred] is a proper noun referring to this specific breed, though often not capitalized, especially in non-specialist publications, and outside the US."

4 comments:

  1. "There must be other names that could be reconfigured in a similar manner."

    The only one I can think of is the actress 54 Tyler who always writes her first name in Roman numerals.

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  2. Seriously though, my son has a friend named Nate who often writes his name as "N8".

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  3. I had a Latino student who wrote her last name as "8a" Ochoa.

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  4. Potoooooooo is not to be confused with the potoo:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C3sCm1fzSI

    ReplyDelete