What’s in a name?
Apparently not much these days. Naming our children has become a practice with sometimes comical and sometimes damaging results.
The ancients often named their children with a word that meant something in their language. For example, King David’s name meant “beloved of God” because that’s what his father Jesse wanted him to be. Jesus renamed Simon as Peter, which meant “the rock,” a description of the solid character that Christ wanted Peter to provide for the fledgling church.
Puritans often named their children for personal qualities they wanted them to have: Patience, Chastity, Prudence.
Names go in cycles. A century ago women were named for beautiful things like jewels or flowers. Our great-grandmothers were called Jewel, Garnet, Ruby, Iris or Lily. Those names are making a comeback as we tire of Ariana, Britney and Hailee.
America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage was handed down to men through names like Robert, William, George, Alfred and John. Non-Anglo immigrants chose names used in their own homelands to remind children of their origins.
Many people have favored Bible names to pass on their spiritual heritage to their children, so we have Mary, Ruth, Samuel, Matthew, Mark and Paul.
These names were supposed to have a function in a person’s life. Children’s names connected them to a character trait, to family, to tradition or to God. A name gave a child something or someone to measure up to. It was up to the child to make the name important again in his own way.
Then to what do we owe the current crop of first and middle names? Several forces seem to be driving the name game that I see as I read school honor rolls in the newspaper.
One source of names appears to be celebrities and entertainers. Thus we have a crop of Brittneys, Chandlers, Beyonces and Dakotas from music and prime time TV. Do you suppose we’ll start hearing of little Bidens and Kamalas? They’ve certainly entertained us lately!
Another name source is a first name made from what has usually been a last name. Examples would be names like Kennedy, Taylor, Lockhart or Barnett. Maybe parents hope these names will make their child seem like a more important, serious person.
But it’s the child who makes the name significant, not the other way around. Names considered ‘nerdy” today like Henry and Albert took on great significance when Henry Ford and Albert Einstein made them illustrious. A guy whose contribution to life is to be a couch potato living with his parents at age 30 won’t fool anybody into thinking he’s important just because his parents named him “Stanton.” The cool-sounding name of “Hunter” didn’t do Joe Biden’s kid much good.
Possibly the worst naming trend right now is to try to make a child sound different or special by making up an entirely new name that is really just a sound or a set of syllables. I speak as a classroom veteran. This is where parents are doing their children a disservice.
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” implying that the names of things do not affect what they really are. Juliet was wrong.
Psychologists say that names have power. In tests of the effect of various names on our expectations of them, teachers and bosses react positively to student names like Jason and Emily and negatively to names like Hubert and Olga. Fair or not, expectations can affect grades or a job.
A child’s name is part of his self-concept. Having a name that no one can spell, pronounce or remember gives kids a complex and puts them on the defensive every time they have to introduce themselves.
Instead of making Latonsori’a (I hope I’m making this up) special, she’s going to be embarrassed by having to spell her name over and over for teachers, explain the unneeded apostrophe, listen to people mispronounce it, and be hung with an unflattering nickname like “Tonsils.”
And if parents just want to make a common name different—Genifor instead of Jennifer, for instance—they’re condemning the child, again, to a lifetime of fighting Spellcheck.
A good rule of thumb is that it’s more important to help the child learn to be different than to give her a name that only makes her sound different. But in our style-conscious society, it’s easier to give somebody an important-sounding name than to nurture her to become a special person.
If we, like the Puritans, named our children for qualities we want them to have today, perhaps we’d name them things like Resourceful, Independent, Successful, or maybe the most prized of modern attributes—High Paid!
Well, “High Paid Smith” is easy to spell, possible to pronounce, memorable, and, unlike “Latonsori’a” it might just give his boss a great idea for High Paid’s future one day!
