names pt. 1

first draft

"A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet."
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"Not if you called it a stinkweed."
- Bart Simpson, The Simpsons

The personal name is an important label. It gives us a sense of self, a direction, a mold to fit, shoes to fill, even expectations to fight against. A name given by others always carries with it their expectations for the receiver - parents naming a child; an owner naming a pet; friends or classmates assigning a nickname - and this can fill the named one with pride, hope, or horror. The personal name, in Western societies at least, is more flexible than the family name and can be used to show changing national or social alliances. The children of immigrants have often been given names common in their parents' adopted country rather than their homeland for this reason. In some cultures, a personal name has been a flexible thing, easily changed with the passing time and the development of the person through experience and maturity. Slate magazine, my favorite online news source, had this to say about the matter in current Chinese society. The author, Huan Hsu, mentions the fluidity of identity in China, something that is lacking in other countries: "people tend to view names and identities as absolute things," he writes. This seems to have been true for all of recent Western history. Even when a surname could change with relative ease, the first name was stuck to a person like a lamprey to a shark.

Many European countries have or have had stringent laws governing personal names. In many, it was not legally possible to change a name, once given. The flip side is that the law had a lot to say about giving the name in the first place, sometimes to a ridiculous extreme. In Catholic countries, the baptismal name was the name, and for many centuries the priest had the final say on a baby's label. A child might be automatically called officially by the name of the saint honored on the day of birth or baptism, no matter what the parents wanted to call the child. In Poland, a name day celebration was, at least at one time, more important than a birthday. Under the Franco regime, all children born in Spain had to have Spanish names, unless there was no possible Spanish equivalent. These naming laws have been softened in the last decades, but only a couple of years ago the Spanish Civil Registry refused to allow a couple, both born in Colombia, to name their daughter Beliza, saying that the name didn't exist. The parents argued that it was from a play by Lope de Vega (Lope de Vega, for the love of god), but in the play the name was spelled with an s, so the Spanish bureaucrats, in their ceaseless quest to serve the public, refused to allow a variation with z. The language must be protected somehow, you know.

By being careful about naming in the first place, a government may prevent some petitions for name changes in the future. In the United States, apparently, we prefer the "better to say you're sorry than to ask permission" system, whereby the parents have much more authority in the beginning, and the children more rights to change later. There are rumors and documentation of ... unfortunate names. Some seem to be jokes played on uneducated parents by wiseass doctors (Placenta, Chlamydia); some make an interesting combination with the surname (United States, Wanna Koke, E. Pluribus Ewbanks); and some are just odd all by themselves (Five-Eight, Pennsylvania and Erie Railroad, Whom-the-Lord-Preserved).

An unusual name has a definite effect on the psyche. As Christopher Andersen observed several decades ago in The Name Game, children with strange names likely have strange parents, and will grow up to be strange themselves. The oddly monikered may be pleasantly unusual or criminally weird, but they tend not to be "average". Speaking of criminals, there have been cases of such people who, when fleeing the law or their past, begin to use new names and really seem to become different people, at least on the surface. Of course, some are lawbreakers or assholes no matter what their names are. However, because the name is such a big part of the first impressions people make, a different name can easily provoke a different reaction from people one meets, and in turn different reactions from the newly-named.

When name changes are allowed, there are often still restrictions. One cannot name oneself after one's favorite brandname, product, or celebrity, in most cases. Unfortunately for the children involved, these restrictions might not be in place for the initial naming and this produces examples like Adolph Hitler Campbell. The father might have a point in saying that a name is just a name, not a destiny, but saddling his child with such a psychologically weighty title seems like a cowardly way to make his point. A person with full confidence in this belief would take the name himself. It may be, however, that this change was prohibited by law, while naming a child after an infamously angry Austrian is not.

Names go through cycles of popularity. Some rise and fall in numbers, while others become so tied to a particular time period that when they go, they enter a kind of onomastic limbo where they are known, but only as ghosts or musty old ideas from years gone by. Sources appear and lose their value, from legends, celebrities, family members, to random joinings of sounds. In some languages, a name still means something objectively, but in others, it only means what, or rather who, it can be connected to.

Many names of Black Americans seem to be the only ones that are absolutely without etymology and history. The reason for this could be related to cultural identification. A Black American may have little reason to identify or to even want to identify with mainstream (white) culture and its names; the family is many generations and centuries from its African roots and any family, tribal or cultural naming traditions have been utterly lost; instead of glomming onto somebody else's name culture, why not create their own?