Living with Lynn

No one has ever written a song about a girl called Lynn, and I guess they never will - it's such a plain, ineffectual word. I wasn't always called Lynn, I was known as Ling Ling in the early years but I don't recall a song about her either.

I really didn't have an issue with 'Lynn' until Lynn Benfield, otherwise known as the prudish, downtrodden personal assistant of Alan Partridge made an appearance back in 1997. What was it about 'Lynn' that made Steve Coogan choose it for the beige, nervous, social leper stuck in a dead end job? Why aren't there any other notable Lynn's around (apart from Redgrave and Barber)?

Image: bbc.co.uk

Over the next two decades we didn't have any other Lynn's permeating into popular culture. Although it would be reasonable to assume, that I am the one and only person on earth paying any attention to the relevance of Lynn Benfield as a part of our zeitgeist.

And then in 2012, the Lynn associations went to a whole new level. The hands down funniest scene of Seth MacFarlane's comedy Ted involved Mark Wahlberg guessing the white trash name of the cashier that Ted had recently hooked up with. Watch it here and hear me wince:

It's perhaps no coincidence that on an American baby name website, the list of 'famous Lynn's' is made up of beauty queens from the Midwest.

Oh well.