Some Irish American surnames can seem almost plausible while also making your ears hurt
American actress Ali McGraw in London for the premiere of the film Love Story in 1971. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
So was his surname a variant of what we call McDowell, just with the wrong patronymic? No. The Irish in him came via a grandmother with the impeccably standard Hibernian surname of Fitzgerald.The Derry man who influenced George Washington and Alexander Hamilton - Brian Maye on Hercules MulliganBut before she would marry a Louisiana Frenchman called Augustus Odoul, she insisted he add a “proper Irish apostrophe” after his O. Thus was the quirky surname put on the map, eventually.
O’Day’s inspiration was the American slang for money. As she explained in her memoir: “I’d decided O’Day was groovy because in pig Latin it meant dough which was what I hoped to make.” But to us, his crimes also seem to include unauthorised possession of a prefix no genuine Murphy would claim. And unlike R.P. McMurphy, her improvised surname may at least have the excuse of having been founded on a high-class bilingual pun. Inspired by her loveliness, Giacomo Casanova claimed to have called her O’Morphi, from the Greek omorfia, meaning “beauty”.
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