One of the sillier pleasures of life in America is the childish fun that can still be had from coming across an odd name. Of course it’s an accident of Americans’ richly diverse cultural demography – lots of names that have lost or gained something in translation from their original German, Russian, Italian or Chinese. Of course it’s the lowest form of wit to make fun of foreign names that have been clumsily anglicised. And of course I know that, transliterated into Mongolian, my own name probably sounds to the locals very similar to the slang term for camel dung. But I still find it hard to suppress a laugh when I read about the exploits of great Americans such as Orson Swindle.

In fact there is something magnificently Dickensian, or, perhaps we should now say, J. K. Rowlingsian, about so many of the names you will come across in all walks of American life. It’s as though somewhere along the line they have deliberately chosen onomatopoeic, alliterative, or just plain hilarious names so that, in a big country, where there’s always lots of competition for everything, we’ll remember them better.

Whenever I’m on Capitol Hill I get an absurd amount of amusement simply by perusing the lists of the members of Congress.

My current favourite is Zach Wamp. He sounds like he should be bursting forth from the pages of an action hero comic book, smiting some alien enemy of the people. He is in fact a distinctly human and rather effective member of Congress from Tennessee.

Congresswoman Virginia Foxx promises something slightly racy, a nom de film that suggests a bit of a past, perhaps, in the seamier side of Hollywood. Don’t be fooled. In real life she is a rather strait-laced grandmotherly figure who looks after the interests of some of the good folk in North Carolina.

And how clever and capable does Bart Stupak have to be to succeed as well as he obviously has in Michigan politics? I’m ashamed to say that I have enjoyed many a puerile snigger whenever I have come across industrious congressman from New England for many years.

Actually strange last names can become a useful weapon, either in the hands of the owner or in the possession of the enemy. Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives last year after 12 years in which they had become, according to their critics, increasingly lazy, slow-moving and out of touch with voters. How useful, then, for their opponents that two of their leaders were called DeLay and Doolittle.

And in business, an improbably strange name can, with the right amount of marketing ingenuity, be turned into an asset rather than a liability.

The largest maker of jams and jellies in some pronouncement from Michael Crapo or John Boehner. Both insist, of course, on spoiling things with cleverly contrived and distracting pronunciations. Mr Crapo uses the long “a” to pronounce his name, as in “plane” and “same”. Mr Boehner has prudently chosen to make sure people know that his surname rhymes with “trainer” .

None of them comes close to my all-time favourite, though, Dick Swett, which sounds a bit like an unpleasant communicable medical disorder but actually was the name of an America is still called Smuckers, after the family that started the business. As it says on the jam jars, “With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good!” Of course you can’t do much about a surname (“last name”, as Americans call it), but you can be very creative with first names. One of the more interesting sociological changes in the past 30 years in the US has been the shifting choices of first names by African-Americans.

As parents have discarded the hated names passed down to them from slave-owning times, seen as lingering symbols of their own inequality, African-Americans increasingly answer to a fabulous array of exotic names.

This is most obviously on display in the sports world. It used to be the case that you could easily tell the ethnic origin of sportsmen just by looking at their names. Anyone who had an impeccably British-sounding name – James Brown, John Smith, Winston Jones – would almost always be a black man. All the Caucasians would have Irish, German, Italian or East European names. Perhaps the greatest footballer of all time was Joe Namath, a white man. In baseball, Jackie Robinson is legendary as the first black man to break the colour bar.

Now there are all sorts of unfamiliar choices. Elegant ancient African monikers – As-ante and Amani, for example – are extremely popular. But so too are more modern inventions. For some reason many of these seem to have been created with a hint of French in mind. There must be dozens of LeBrons, Le-Mars and LaRons now in all kinds of professional sport.

Then there is the odd tendency to take a familiar Western name and give it a strange spelling. So, for example, Antoine has, for sportsmen, become Antowain.

Finally, there are just the marvellous neologisms, creations that predestined those babies to whom they were given to grow into sportsmen.

How could someone christened Plaxico be anything other than a tall, graceful, wide receiver for an American football team?

The right song for unbelievable Hillary

Hillary Clinton is having a competition among users of her website to find a campaign song. The shortlist contains the usual mix of the drearily obvious, message-laden stuff (Beautiful Day by U2), the predictably self-adulatory nonsense (Simply the Best by Tina Turner) and the cringe-makingly sycophantic (Every Little Thing She Does is Magic by the Police).

Surely they could have done better. How about South Pacific’s I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair? I’d have thought that given her complicated family history and its encumbrances, this would have been very appropriate. Or maybe, in reference to the many political transformations she has executed in the past ten years (and I may be in danger of betraying my prejudices, here) how about I Don’t Believe You by Bob Dylan?

Bad boys’ anthem

On the subject of music, I shall finally get around to attending my first home baseball game of the season tonight for my local Washington Nationals team. They’re terrible, so as ever the main interest will be not what’s being played on the field but what’s being played on the stadium’s PA system.

It’s a striking feature of American sport that the teams’ sound technicians have a strong affinity for the music of British rock bands. Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones will begin almost every football game. Gary Glitter is unmentionable now in Britain in light of his brushes with the law, but still Rock’n’Roll Part Two is belted out at most events. Others that get the US crowd cheering are Queen, Squeeze and even the Cure.

Where I’m going tonight, with one of the worst teams in baseball, something homegrown, perhaps by Leonard Cohen, would surely be more appropriate.

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