What's in a President's name?

The Norman Transcript

March 14, 2008 12:24 am

— It's fun to mess around with the letters in the names of our American presidents:
If you reverse the last two letters of Richard Nixon's last name, you get a double negative ? nix + no.
Two presidents have had double letters in both their first and last names ? William Harrison and Millard Fillmore.
Four 20th century presidents have had surnames containing oo -- Roosevelt, Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt. All these men occupied the Oval Office in the first half of the twentieth century, three of them sequentially.
Nine presidents with double letters in one of their names served sequentially -- William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson were elected sequentially and alphabetically.
Taft and Nixon are the only presidential surnames that begin and end with the same letter. Theodore Roosevelt is the only U.S. president whose full name begins and ends with the same letter.
Rutherford B. Hayes's first name contains the last name of Gerald Ford. Andrew and Lyndon Johnson's last name contains the first name of four other presidents -- Adams, John Quincy Adams, Tyler and Kennedy.
Pierce, Grant, Ford, Carter, Bush, Bush, and (in Britain) Hoover are all common words when uncapitalized.
Every member of Lyndon Baines Johnson's family had the initials LBJ -- his wife, Lady Bird, and his daughters, Linda Bird and Luci Baines.
A number of presidential last names can be charaded (cleft in two) to reveal two separate words: Washington = washing + ton; Adams = a + dams; Jackson = jack + son; Fillmore = fill + more; Johnson = john + son; Hayes = ha + yes; Hoover = ho + over; and Nixon = nix + on.