When Jamie Fraser started up his life in Edinburgh, he took on an alias as a printer in Outlander. The name A. Malcolm immediately stood out to Claire and Roger, and to the Outlander fans as well. It stood out so much that some may have wondered why Jamie thought using middle names was a good idea.
Well, Jamie wasn’t the only one to use middle names as an alias. In Outlander season 7, Lord John Grey also used his middle names. At claireandjamie.com, we explained where the name Bertram Armstrong came from.
It turns out that the use of middle names is common for creating aliases. Found season 2 explained the logic behind it in a recent episode.
Found explains why middle names make good aliases for people
The truth is most people aren’t going to know middle names. If we don’t share them, why would any normal person know it. It’s a little easier for people to find middle names now due to social media and names being available online via public documents, but it was much harder in the time of Jamie Fraser and Lord John Grey.
Found season 2, episode 14 focused on the search for a woman who went missing after meeting an online date. It turned out that it was someone closer to her, and the M&A Team realized that it had to be someone using an alias. Now the team had to work through individuals again with this in mind, which is when a character named Jamie (yes, really, Sassenachs!) shared that when people create aliases, they tend to use middle names. It’s much easier for people to remember their own aliases when it’s already a name that they know.
They’re already used to hearing people call them by a middle name, especially a parent. How many of us grew up with our full names being used when we were in trouble for something? That makes a reaction more instant when someone uses that name people are using as an alias.
Jamie and John chose names they could easily remember in Outlander
So, it makes sense that Jamie and John would both pick their own middle names for their aliases. These are names that they are both used to. It also helped that their middle names could work well as both first and last names—Malcolm is a clan name in Scotland and Armstrong is a popular surname in English-speaking countries.
Now the use of the two aliases makes a lot more sense from a fandom point of view. I don’t remember it ever being explained in the Outlander books why the two characters went for names that other people would potentially already know, but NBC's Found has helped it make a lot more sense.
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