MovieChat Forums > An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) Discussion > Mayo--a good Italian name?

Mayo--a good Italian name?

posted 8 years ago by DrakeStraw
3 replies | jump to latest

I watched the movie tonight for the third or fourth time and noticed something I missed before. Zach Mayo states that his name is Italian and he's Irish on his mother's side. There's a problem here. Mayo is not an Italian name unless the spelling has been altered from Maio which is a type of tree. There is no Y in Italian except for foreign words.

Mayo is a good Irish name, however. There is of course a County Mayo, derived from the Gaelic. William Mayo founder of the Mayo clinic was British, also with no Italian derivation to his name.

DrakeStraw
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[–] grendelkhan 8 years ago

Could have easily have been altered when the family came to America. There are tons of examples of spellings being changed by immigration officials, both due to their ignorance and illiteracy on the part of the immigrant. They could have also anglicized it to better fit in with their new land. It's pretty common.

Fortunately, Ah keep mah feathers numbered for just such an emergency!

[–] DrakeStraw 8 years ago

Did you hear about the Chinese man named Kowalski? He was behind a Polish man at Ellis Island and answered the question about his name with his own, Sam Ting. It cracked me up when I saw the Chinese physicist with the name from the joke on TV.

DrakeStraw
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[–] Naughty-God 8 years ago

Could have been Americanized Italian, or as it's normally referred to as "Anglicized" from DeMeo to Mayo and since the Irish had about 100 years head start in North America before the Southern and Easter Europeans arrived it was common to turn a non-English surname into something more familiar sounding to locals.

There are millions of Amerians with heritage from the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Russians, Ukranians, Greeks, and Italians but the name that appears at Ellis Island might be Woods (Wodowski), Glassman (Sklar), Ross (Rossetti), Dickenson (Ditka), and so on.