The vagaries of taste! A line of dialogue from the third episode of the first season of Game of Thrones: “Lancel. Gods, what a stupid name. Lancel Lannister. Who named you, some half-wit with a stutter?”
One wonders what—in a world populated by Cerseis and Galbarts and Tobhos and Viseryses and Waymars and Theons—makes Lancel any stupider than any other name. Is it simply its pairing with Lannister that singles it out? If his name were Lancel Stark or Lancel Baratheon, would he be subject to the same derision? And if Theon Greyjoy were named Theon Baratheon, would he, too, fall prey to Robert’s lacerating wit?
(My brother, a few weeks ago: “I was going to live-tweet my reading of Game of Thrones sentence by sentence, but I misspelled a character’s name in the very first one.”)
Just last week I read the bit in "The Sworn Sword" about King Lancel V! So yeah, it's apparently a traditional royal Lannister name from the days before the Targaryen conquest, when Lannister kings ruled the Westerlands. I think it's supposed to be more of an expression of Robert's general bitterness toward the Lannisters than anything else.
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