Naming and Claiming

I admit to spending as much time, recently, on Facebook as on Blogger. Mea culpa.

It is fascinating to reconnect with friends, from college days and even from high school days. But, there is a significant challenge for women looking for friends from the past--if those friends are also women. What NAME to use for searching.

While I may remember the family names (or last names) of those high school or college friends, I have no way of knowing their married names, unless I stayed in constant contact with them. Some I did, many I didn't. And, how should I identify myself on Facebook?

This is not a problem that my brother, also on Facebook, has. He still has the same first and last name he had while in college. My sister, another Facebook user, has solved the problem by including her birth last name along with her married last name. It works--but since our family name is somewhat lengthy (10 letters and 4 syllables), it does get a bit unwieldy.

When I got married, in the mid 1960s, it was still very much the norm for a woman to give up her last name. By the 1970s, some women solved the question of what last name by going double barrel with a last name.

We know of one couple who decided that taking a last name was too much like ownership, so they fabricated a new last name by combining elements of their first names for their children. Interesting approach--a family with 3 sets of last names: his, hers, and the children's.

Today, of course, women are as likely to retain the last name of their birth family just as men do.

The only simple solution that I can see is to have a single name that requires no last name, like Cher, for example.

So, who else can be easily identified with just one name?

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photo of Cher from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cher_a_paris-2007.jpg

Hello, My Name is. . .

As each new semester approaches, I speculate what names will be the double-up names. You see, each semester that I have taught at my community college, I always have two students who share a first name. And almost always, this occurs among the young women in class. From this doubling up on first names, I can tell what were the trendy names the year they were born.

• Megan


• Jessica


• Desiree


• Ashley


• Karen


• Brittany


• Amber

These are but some of the double up names I have had. So, I peeked at the advance registration for the spring semester—and, sure enough, I have a double up name: Amanda.

This business of naming does fascinate me. I wrote about it a while back, here. At that time, I looked at the Social Security Administration’s listing of most popular first names over the decades. I found another spiffy site that shows the same thing, with a bit more pizzazz.

A year ago, I read the highly interesting book Freakonomics. The authors suggest that some first names that are super-trendy or super-ethnic may not serve their charges well. You can see some of what they have to say here. It would certainly be interesting to hear their take, now that we have elected our first African-American president with a decidedly un-presidential first name of Barack.

To this point in our history, we have had 2 presidents first named Andrew, 2 named Franklin; 3 named George; 4 named John; 4 named William; and the most popular first name with 6—James. Prior to Barack, probably the previous most unusual first name was Ulysses.

I wonder how long it will be until we have a U.S. President with a first name of Amanda, or Ashley, or Karen, or Kristen, or. . .?

Maybe part of the mental block that Americans have for envisioning a woman as president has to do with the lack of strength too many first names for women hold these days. When our daughter was born, and we pondered a strong first name for her, we naturally turned to family first names. While I dearly love the women in my family life, I was not prepared to give our daughter some of the old-fashioned names. So I eschewed names like Dorcas, Mary, Ada, Kathryn, Leoda, Emma, Cora, Lillian and Ida. Even though we didn't pick a family name, I like the strong name my husband and I agreed on for our daughter’s name.

Several years ago, I remember that Garrison Keillor read a poem about strong women names—so I went looking for it. Here it is: what a wonderful way to celebrate the strong names of women.

Mourning the Dying of American Female Names

By Hunt Hawkins

In the Altha Diner in the Florida panhandle
a stocky white-haired woman
with a plastic nameplate “Mildred”
gently turns my burger, and I fall into grief.
I remember the long, hot drives to North Carolina
to visit Aunt Alma, who puts up quarts of peaches,
and my grandmother Gladys with her pieced quilts
Many names are almost gone: Gertrude, Myrtle,
Agnes, Bernice, Hortense, Edna, Doris, and Hilda.
They were wide women, cotton-clothed, early rising.
You have to move your mouth to say their names,
and they meant strength, spear, battle, and victory.
When did women stop being Saxons and Goths?
What fate frog turned them into Alison, Melissa,
Valeria, Natalie, Adrienne, and Lucinda,
diminished them to Wendy, Cindy, Susy, and Vicky?
I look at these young women and hope
they are headed for the Presidency,
but I fear America has other plans in mind,
that they be no longer at war
but subdued instead in amorphous corporate work,
somebody’s assistant, something in a bank,
single parent with word processing skills.
They must have been made French
so they could be cheap foreign labor.
Well, all I can say is
good luck to you
Kimberly, Darlene, Cheryl, Heather, and Amy.
Good luck April, Melanie, Becky, and Kelly.
I hope it goes well for you.
But for a moment let us mourn.
Now it is time to say goodbye
to Florence, Muriel, Ethel, and Thelma.
Goodbye Minnie, Ada, Bertha, and Edith.

Published in The Domestic Life, 1994.

A Rose by any other name. . .

While many lines in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are memorable, and frequently quoted, perhaps few are quoted as much as—

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Juliet speaks these lines in Act 2, scene 2. She is looking out a window, dreamily thinking of Romeo. Now, what precisely is the prompting of those lines? She has learned that Romeo, this handsome young boy who has stolen her heart, is the son of her family’s sworn enemy—the Montagues. Juliet is a Capulet, and for insults that happened long before the play began these two families have been feuding.

In this scene, she first says—

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.

Even though these lines are frequently said as though Juliet is looking for Romeo, in fact she is wondering—why are you named Romeo Montague? Then, her declaration—

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

What she really wonders is—why can’t you be you and yet be named something else.

All of which brings me to my musing—what is in a name? Does it really matter what name our parents give us? If you have children, no doubt you pondered the name you picked out fairly carefully. Maybe you chose an old family name. Maybe you picked something trendy.

When we named our first child, we had two names—a boy’s and a girl’s name. When we had a boy, we named our son Geoffrey, choosing the old English spelling purposefully (after all, I was an English major, and Geoffrey Chaucer is a major author!). When we had our daughter, we selected only a girl’s name, as we knew what we were having. We purposefully didn’t pick something too trendy. Her first name begins with K (hence the KGMom name I use, i.e. the first initials of my children’s names).

My name, Donna, is one of those generational names. Usually, when I meet someone named Donna, she was born somewhere between 1940 and 1960. Donna has fallen away in popularity, although it was never in the top 10.

Speaking of top 10, every year, I have TWO of some name in my classes. Usually, the two will be a girl’s name, and I know it must have been the trendy name for whatever year in which these young women were born. This year, the double name was Ashley. One year it was Amanda. One year, Amber. A names are popular!

There are many places on the Internet that give a rundown of the top 10 names by year. One of the most comprehensive is the Social Security Administration, which lists them back to 1880. You can learn there that from 1880 to 1924 the top boy’s name and the top girl’s name were John and Mary! In 1924, the top boy’s name changed to Robert. Not until 1947 does the girl’s top name change, and then it changed to Linda.

For kicks, here are tables for the top 10 names in 2006, 1950 and 1900.

2006

1 Jacob; Emily
2 Michael; Emma
3 Joshua; Madison
4 Ethan; Isabella
5 Matthew; Ava
6 Daniel; Abigail
7 Christopher; Olivia
8 Andrew; Hannah
9 Anthony; Sophia
10 William; Samantha

1950

1 James; Linda
2 Robert; Mary
3 John; Patricia
4 Michael; Barbara
5 David; Susan
6 William; Nancy
7 Richard; Deborah
8 Thomas; Sandra
9 Charles; Carol
10 Gary; Kathleen

1900

1 John; Mary
2 William; Helen
3 James; Anna
4 George; Margaret
5 Charles; Ruth
6 Robert; Elizabeth
7 Joseph; Florence
8 Frank; Ethel
9 Edward; Marie
10 Henry; Lillian

In general, girls’ names change more than boys’ names.

I would bet that many people wonder, if they don’t already know, why they got the name they have. My birth family had first names all beginning with D. When my sister was born (written about in Sibling Stories II) my parents contemplated giving her a non-D name, not to break the run of Ds but just because they were considering another name. I believe it was my aunt who said in horror—you have to give her a D name. Whatever the reason, my sister was named Denise. (My brother is Daryl.)

Sometimes being named for someone works out well. Sometimes not. My husband rues his first name which his mother had heard of from a family acquaintance. Since his name is in reality a surname, he frequently has his first name misunderstood. People call him various names, but not necessarily his first name.

When our daughter was little, she would challenge us and ask why we gave her the name we did. Well, I said—there weren’t family names that I thought would work. My mother-in-law was Mary, a grand old name, but it didn’t seem to fit. My mother’s name was Dorcas, which is really an old-fashioned name. I had aunts named Ada, Kathryn, Katherine, and Leoda. None of them seemed quite right, although our daughter said she would have liked Kate (at least she felt that way when she was little). And the grandmothers’ names were even less suitable: Ida, Lillian, Emma and Cora. Now, Emma is very trendy and might have worked—but, oh well.

When I was little, I coveted a grand sweeping name like Gloria. (Oh boy, am I ever NOT a Gloria!) We have many of us been there—thinking another name would change us in some way.

Just remember Juliet’s pronouncement—

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.