In reply to Duncan Bourne:
> At work the head of our Enterprise team is........wait for it.........Jim Kirk
> I also work with a Neil Armstrong
I'm jealous.
My previous employer had a number of offices in the Far East. It's quite usual for locals in places like Taiwan and South Korea who work for companies headquartered in Europe or the US to choose a Western first name for work purposes, to make things easier for their overseas colleagues. We were delighted to find that Mr Pan had picked the name Peter when he joined our company - especially since we already had a Wendy working the same office.
My Dad swears that the maths text book he used at school was written by one Seymour Legge. (This was pre-WWII: I think in those days you just kept quite about such things, on the grounds that finding it funny said more about you than it did about the person concerned, or their parents.)
At the risk of being accused of spreading another urban legend, a friend of ours who is an obstetric nurse insists that this actually happened to her. According to her a conversation with one new mother went something like this:
"Have you chosen a name for your new baby daughter yet?"
"Yes, we've decided to call her Femally."
"Er...that's an unusual name."
"Yes, we saw it on the chart for one of the other babies in the unit and we really liked it."
"How do spell it?"
"F-E-M-A-L-E."
IIRC this was supposed to have occurred in a hospital somewhere in Fife. (Or maybe I did just make that bit up.)
In a similar vein - and this happened to my Mum one time when she was supervising a student doing teaching practice in a school in one of the Erewash Valley towns - was the little boy who told her that his name was "Gooey". Spelled G-U-Y.