Essay: What's in a Name?

Pick up an old novel by one of the Russian masters or a new memoir by a Soviet dissident and notice how people introduce themselves -- last names first. "Good day, I am Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich." Notice too how often, perhaps in rebellion against those cumbrous Russian patronymics, they use only their initials. "Good day, I am Scriabin, A.N." The title of a French movie made a few years back, Lacombe, Lucien, was apparently intended to show how the German Occupation had bureaucratized and dehumanized the susceptible French. But the Russians do not have their reversed names imposed on them; they seem to reverse them freely on their own. Perhaps that is always the way with dehumanization; we willingly do it to ourselves.

There is some deeply mystical power in the names we give things and in the process of naming. God's first act after saying, "Let there be light" was to "call the light Day, and the darkness he called Night." One of his first acts after creating Adam was to bring every beast of the field so that Adam could give them names, "and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof."

One of the most pleasant avocations of pregnancy -- and one of the earliest assertions of parental power -- is deciding on the baby's name. The discussions sometimes go on until after the baby is born, when it becomes clear, for example, that the little girl should not be called Howard. Occasionally, of course, the father's (or mother's) yearning for a son is so intense that the girl is called Howard anyway. Some nations feel obliged to intervene against such eccentricities. In France, it is illegal to give any child a name that is not already held by a saint (or a "well-known figure in ancient history"), who presumably would watch over the protege. The courts specifically forbade one couple to name their child Cerise (Cherry). In the U.S., by contrast, the Navy once got applications from half a dozen brothers who all bore names like Measles Jones and Pneumonia Jones and whatever other ills had afflicted the family at the time of their births.

We can only guess at the psychological effects of names (What happens when that girl Howard reaches an age to be interested in other Howards?), but it seems reasonable to suggest that a boy named John will grow up differently from one named Cuthbert. He is less likely to be beaten up by his schoolmates, for one thing. Fashions change, though, as Gertrude gives way to Marilyn, and Marilyn to Debbie; a name that would have seemed weird a generation ago, like Kimberly, becomes a cliche.

Some names have a special kind of imprint. The famous Miss Hogg, whose father cruelly named her Ima, had good reason to grow up scowling, but maybe she would have even if she had been named something sweet, like Charlotte. Anyone named James Oliver Buswell IV carries his parents' announcement of a certain view of the child's place in the world, but the effect of such a view probably differs considerably from one person to another. Someone with a name like Otto inevitably knows the burdens of an ethnic heritage, but so, presumably, do Madonna Ciccone and Fernando Valenzuela, and we all survive.