Fair, I thought I might be missing some reference. :P

In case you don't know Cormoran is also a kind of bird, Cormoran Strike's synonym could be Chicken Punch or Turkey Slap.

Ok, that's amazing. xD

Didn't occur to me to explain that :D Yeah, without knowing that it's not nearly as funny.

Cormorant is a type of bird, Cormoran is a mythical giant.

You're also right but the french disagree.

In finnish version of Asterix the bard is called Trubadurix.

Superfly Johnson

I just remembered two wonderfully subtle ones- Savage Opress from Clone Wars and Vandal Savage from DC Comics. I wonder if they might be related...

There are some incredible stupid names in Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

One of the weirdest ones is Doctor Merkwurdigliebe.

I guess it's a reference to Dr. Strangelove.

It's been mentioned already, but the name of the Totally-Not-Emperor, Snoke, in the latest Star Wars movie. The name reminds me of Snopes every time I hear it, and that -- coupled with the fact that this obviously-CGI creature looks like it'd belong more in a Harry Potter movie -- kind of spoiled it for me.

Also, keeping with my Star Wars examples: almost every character whose name starts with "Darth" and doesn't end with "Vader" has got a name that at least qualifies as lame, if not as "incredibly stupid".

The Prefect was a Ford model that was not sold in the U.S., so American audiences weren't in on that joke. =)

You win the thread, this is the worst one by far. Even the editor of the official Star Wars website couldn't keep their face straight: I absolutely hate when writers presume ignorance on part of the reader. Something I see a lot is direct calques from a language they (think only they) know (and are special for it).
[As a fan of pseudohistoric fantasy: you know if the reader is supposed to be in on the reference or not. In the former case, there's Fantasy Rome in the book and it's okay. In the latter case, there's Elfland populated by people with pointy ears and elfy names, but they pepper their speech with Spanish words, and there's a Elf-English dictionary in the appendix which is just mispronounced Spanish.]

Then there's Obscure English Words (which are only obscure to the illiterate author: if you've ever opened a tabletop roleplaying book, you know all of them). Say, Our Heroes overhear something about a mysterious "portal" and it takes them half the movie to figure out a portal is a sort of doorway.

Taking two random, common English words... and misspelling one... dude, I seriously don't even. My teeth ache. Dude.

I wrote a sex advice column. I advertised a strip show in a cheerful singsong voice. I didn't think there's an amount of victimless stupidity that I wouldn't be okay with for money. But this is too much. Holy cow. Holy fucking cow.

Yeah, I didn't even get far enough with the series to meet the character, so when I first heard of him recently I was like "you're joking, right? No, seriously, what's he really called?... Oh come on, Fuck's sake."

Yeah... Darth Tyranus. No wonder he pretty much never used it.

The funny thing is, when watching the original trilogy I never thought of "Darth" as a title. Just a name. You know

"A young Jedi named Darth Vader, who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights".

So when later on everyone turned out to be Darth This And Darth That it already felt odd to me. When we got to Darth Tyranus and Darth Bane and Darth Plagueis it was hard not to find it laughable. I thinke everyone started to make up his own Sith names, trying in vain to outsilly the "real" ones.

Darth Despicablus
Darth Holocaust
Darth Lepros
Darth Arachnos
Darth Verminous
Darth Uranus