What's in a Name?

It really is an awesome responsibility naming someone(or should be at any rate!). They have to answer to it (live it, love it)their whole life- or at least until they're old enough to have it legally changed.(By the same token, they can get a perfectly acceptable name- like Bill or Fred or Sam , and upon reaching legal age, change it to something completely moronic like Trout Fishing in America or dotcomguy--sorta like giving your identity a tattoo, and a stoopid one at that!). Personally I've never had to name any creature with less than four legs, and even there usually gone with conservative 'Christian' names: my dog Lester, my cat Maxine, former cats Bob, Helen, George, Roberta, etc..


The various times during marriage when I thought Daddyhood was imminent we bandyed about some names. My choices were, so I thought, nice euphonious ones, as names go: Ethan for a boy, Lauren for a girl. They could live with those names, the kids who'd have to bear them. I mean, life is tough enough without some stoopid appellation you've gotta drag around. And no 'junior' either, at least not for me. Let him/her have their own name. If you don't, they're bound to either go by their middle name, or come up with a real doozy of their own anyway(something to make you want to have a different last name than theirs), so...


Actually your name is just a calling card to get you started in this world. It's given to you at birth, and then often taken away and replaced by what people end up calling you- which is usually some version of your actual name(their 'version' of you):thus, Robert can become Bob or Bobby or Rob or Robbie, or, in one case, "Bob-job"(though personally I'm not so sure he actually did what he was accused of having done to earn this dubious sobriquet..). Or even just stay Robert.


Or your "given" name(that is, given to you by others)may just be some handle-like Scrub, Bub, or Grub. Or another entirely different name. Like Bill. Well, that is, if your name isn't Bill of course. One of my Uncles, now 88 years old, has been called by a different name( as it turns out, Bill) for practically his entire life, only recently to be "re-claiming" his original monicker. Roland. That's cool. And way belated(well, my opinion).


In that sense, your name is the one thing of yours that decidedly isn't yours. It's someone else's interpretation, based on their particular misguided beliefs and prejudices. I mean, you can just acquiesce, as my Uncle did, just go along with the program-their program-or you can try and reclaim what's yours. It all depends on just how all fired important it all is to you.

Personally, I think if your name is something you can live with being called, it's one less damn thing to have to think about in life. Sorta like having your socks and underwear laid out in the morning. A calling card to be left at the door. As Frank Zappa said about his kids' unusual names(Dweezil, Moon Unit, Ahmet, Diva), and their probable effect on their lives: it's the last name that's going to get them in trouble!


If I am ever faced with the responsibility of naming a creature with less than 4 legs, I'll probably take a middle-of-the-road approach with fairly traditional names that also sound good. Names that won't embarrass either of us later. Again, one less thing to think about.


I suppose that's the middle-class solution, a correspondingly middle-o-de-road name. The more lax(and some downright unconscionable)decisions in naming seem to come from either the rich or the poor. Preppy or ghetto names. Maybe it's from having either so much or so little money it just doesn't matter. Who knows?


On the preppy side, naming a boy Smithton or Hillhouse would ensure that your son will become either very rich or very tough. And hopefully very sure of his masculinity. Then again, he'll probably go to prep school with other kids named Smithton and Hillhouse, so hopefully they'll all work that out amongst themselves.


Ghetto names often contain the same potential for embarrassment(and thus may also necessitate some boxing/martial arts proficiency on the part of the name's owner), but I find them infinitely more interesting, since they come from an ever-widening array of sources: household/Layaway items, Roman-sounding, Japanese and Japanese-sounding, Hispanic and different permutations thereof, to name a few. From which you get Clorox Miller(and her brother Quasar), Octavius Johnson, Toshiko Washington Carver, and Carlos Murphy.

Hmm, not unlike Zappa's kids, it's the last name that gets you in trouble...

Not real people here, at least not intentionally. No, those are more composite names. And besides the quasi-Spanish names from there: deCarlos, deMarcus(though I've never seen deJorge or dePepe)you've got the purely made-up stuff, pure ghetto etymology, often multiple kids from the same basic root: Shydecious, Shydasia, Shydocious..


Actually many of the made-up names work okay, sound just fine in themselves--the exception being the lady who brought her son into the Emergency Room at a local hospital, his name being pronounced "man-yuh-ray" and spelled m-a-n-u-r-e. (This is supposedly a true story). Other than that, they usually work. It's the mixed names, like Carlos Murphy, that don't really ring true to my ears. Diversity is a wonderful thing but you still wouldn't serve corned beef & cabbage in a taco shell.


Well okay, there's Carlos O'Kelly's. I dunno, never been there. Do they serve corned beef sandwiches in taco shells? The ghetto names may be fictional characters, but Scrub Bub & Grub(see earlier paragraph) are actually real individuals, all living in the same small town in the midwest. For all I know, they probably even all drink in the same--can't say it...


What's in a name, then? As much or as little as you'd like there to be. The whole world, or absolutely nothing!