Newgate

Is this name even a name? What's in a name? Rose, rose, rose, etc.

Newgate Callender used to review crime fiction for the New York Times Book Review. What a funny name, thought I, when a back-of-a-book-blurb by Mr. or Ms. Callender was pointed out to me—indeed, an ideal name to chew on.

Ah, but this was before I learned about the Newgate Calendar, the moralizing tales of felons and their hangings that were popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

So, you got me. I don't especially care about pen names, though I am especially fond of using the nom de plume of one Samuel Clemens to rejoin those who disparage wordplay (and who cite his famous dismissal of puns while making their case).

Elijah

David Brooks thinks this name is abusively pretentious. But, in fact, it's just obviously indication you're Muslim.

Claudia

One thing you can expect to see very little of here are the meanings of names, because I mostly don't give a damn. Calvin means bald, Cameron means crooked nose, and Claudia means lame—but surely the hairless, Jewish, and crippled deserve some recognition, too.

Bonthrop

Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography:

A few minutes later, they became engaged.

The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire.

"I knew it!" she said, for there was something romantic and chivalrous, passionate, melancholy, yet determined about him which went with the wild, dark–plumed name—a name which had, in her mind, the steel–blue gleam of rooks' wings, the hoarse laughter of their caws, the snake–like twisting descent of their feathers in a silver pool, and a thousand other things which will be described presently.

"Mine is Orlando," she said. He had guessed it. For if you see a ship in full sail coming with the sun on it proudly sweeping across the Mediterranean from the South Seas, one says at once, "Orlando," he explained.

LaceDarius

I've heard and read many cryptoracist and/or cryptoclassist screeds about names in my day—and, not-so-arguably, two of my recent posts rank high on that list. But this Washington Post piece about the basketball player LaceDarius Dunn, published this past April, isn't one of them.

Leigh

Beverly Cleary, Dear Mr. Henshaw:

Like I've been telling you, I'm Leigh Botts. Leigh Marcus Botts. I don't like Leigh for a name because some people don't know how to say it or think it's a girl's name. Mom says with a last name like Botts I need something fancy but not too fancy. My Dad's name is Bill and my Mom's name is Bonnie. She says Bill and Bonnie Botts sounds like something out of a comic strip.

Breighleigh

That's Breigh as in weigh (see: Breighdn) and leigh as in Leigh (see: Beverly Cleary's Dear Mr. Henshaw). Actually, what I want to write about is not this spelling, but rather this one: Braylee.

Jaden, Brayden, Caden—I would not name my own child this or that, but I could see why someone might. Jacob is popular, and Jason was; likewise, you have your Brandons and your Brendans, and so on. Laura Wattenberg has covered the popularity of the final "n" quite well.

And though I prefer Katie to Kaylee—and Ashley to Ashlee, if I had to choose—I do not exactly object to the second option. A rose is a rose is a rose, and it is what it is.

But Braylee, Braylee may very well be to euphony what asparagus is to pee, were that analogy in fact sensical; I read it, and all I see is "bray," and I hear it, and all I hear is donkey. (An aside, a fun fact: Eeyore is Hee-haw said with a Cockney accent.) Just terrible, just asinine.

Ree

Ree is the name of the main character in Winter's Bone, a movie that is pretty good and often wonderful. But this is not a website for off-handed film reviews (see: Caden). No, I am here to talk about Ree.

There is a game I sometimes play. Ree would go along swimmingly with it. In the game, I pick a consonant or two and try to find, if I stick a vowel before or between or after 'em, whether it makes a name or not. And I do it with all the vowels. So, for instance, Ree:

Ra — is sort of a name. Would go well with sister Soleil and brother Heliodoro.
Ree — see above.
Rye — not a name. Ryo, though, that's a character from Street Fighter II. Correction: Ryu.
Roe — the name of my second-grade teacher. I do not know if Roe was a nickname.
Rue — a name, though Rue McClanahan was born Eddi-Rue.

A perennial favorite is J---n. To wit:

Jan
Jane
Jean
Jen
Gin
Joan
John
June

A vowel that doesn't quite work is the one that'd yield us—here the spelling rather escapes me—Jyne (see: Ina). And Juhn, whatever that is. Also, permit me to note that nearly every name listed above, save Gin (as in, you know, Virginia) and June, is a derivation of John (assuming, that is, that Jen is short for Jenny, originally a nickname for Jane, not Jennifer).

Breighdn

Here, in alphabetical order, are all the 2005 spellings of Breighdn, male and female, as recorded by the Social Security Administration:
Bradan
Bradden
Braden
Bradin
Bradon
Bradyn
Braedan
Braeden
Braedin
Braedon
Braedyn
Braeton
Braidan
Braiden
Braidon
Braidyn
Braydan
Brayden
Braydin
Braydon
Braydn
Braydyn
Brayton
Breydan
Breyden
Breydon

Please let me know if there are any I've overlooked, or if my alphabetizing leaves something to be desired.

Thalassa

I must just be really into the names of women associated with plants. I don't mean Susan, as in Black-Eyed Susan, or Daisy, I mean Watershine, as in Watershine Woods, who deals with garlic, and now Thalassa, as in Thalassa Cruso, host of the television program (and book series) Making Things Grow—"The Julia Child of Horticulture."

Kirbyjon

Kirbyjon Caldwell officiated Jenna Bush's wedding, the one that took place in front of the giant cross, not the one in Rhinebeck, NY, to a Jew.

Jill

Of all the weird things—that Heidi Montag's plastic surgeon died after driving his car off a cliff—while tweeting—about his border collie—who survived the crash with minor injuries—the weirdest is that dog—Jill—is named after his girlfriend—Charmaine Jill Blake. With Frank Ryan, so goes romance.

Watershine

Watershine Woods is a garlic farmer. You can read about her in Garlic, Garlic, Garlic by Linda and Fred Griffith.

There's also Maybelline Watershine Pure Lipstick.

Gurdon

I just read a memoir published in the latest (September 2010) issue of Harper's. Roxana Robinson names her uncles: Sammy, Gurdon, William, Henry. Gurdon! I didn't place this as a variant of Gordon until I looked it up. It seemed more a mutation of Gudrun.

Addendum: my mother informs me she once knew a man named Gurdon Waddles. He was very nice, and no one thought his name was funny.

Zane

When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, there was some twerp—a fourth-grader, probably, with a nub of a rat-tail—who was a little hotshot basketball player, and I was having none of it. My way of trash-talking him was going up next to him when he was at the water fountain and whispering, with as much cool menace as I could muster, "I bet I can guess your name." I'd overheard someone shout it at him, maybe even someone as embarrassing as his mother.

"Oh, yeah?" he said. "What is it?"

"West," I said.

But it wasn't West, it turned out, and later he probably stole the ball from me or was unimpressed by my left-handed dribbling or something equally impertinent. His name was Zane.

Or maybe I guessed his name was Zane, and it was West. I no longer remember which way it went.

West, the last name of that guy who played Batman. Zane, the last name of my downstairs neighbor, the one who always called up my mother to tell her I was being too loud.

I'm sorry I guessed his name wrong, but I'm glad it was Zane, not West. Unless it was the other way around, in which case I'm doubly sorry.

Jackie

Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint:

...of Jackie and of Jacques, Jacques with que and with s, Jacques with the silent sign of the plural in French and Jackie with his i and his mute e, his feminine silenced and his American ck, Jackie a period name, the period when Algeria's Jewish families, naive, native, were infatuated with foreign names especially the Anglo-American ones. They just loved Jack, William, Pete, and the vocables conjured up by fantasies of a promised land other than France, longed for but increasingly explicitly hostile.... So he was elected Jackie, as my grandfather names his Oran hat shop Highlife pronounced "Iglif," Jackie like Jackie Koogan the Kidd, Jackiderrida, that's him all right, take a gander not everyone sees him. Jackid in his outsize cap, always ready to pick a fight. Jackie like j'acquis get it? and jacqui get who? ...

Hal

Hal and Hank, as in the Steinbrenner sons, are both diminutives of Henry (see also: Harry). In the case of the Steinbrenners, one is a Henry, the other a Harold.

Benedict

I'll say it—that (literary, theatrical, cinematic, televisual) works that call attention to the names of their characters, these are probably bad works. And I love names, so I must be right.

Take True Blood, which is definitely bad. And, what do you know, this is a show that repeatedly has called attention to its characters' names. I remember, for instance, Tara remarking on her name being indication of how her mother abused her, it being also the name of a plantation and all; and recently we had an exchange about Crystal—was she named for champagne or meth? And Eggs, he was so called because his name is Benedict. I know this because he told me.

Then again, I like Nabokov.

Then again again, I do not love Nabokov.

Yvonne

No joke: I was pretty convinced, up until yesterday, that Yvonne was a feminine form of Yvon (which it is), and that both names were variations on John. I mean, they are sort of pronounced (by my rough American tongue) how Ivan is pronounced: ee-VAHN!

But, no, they mean "yew." Yes, "yew."

If I may save face, however, permit me to note that they are ultimately derived from Ivo, meaning "yew"; there is, simultaneously but unrelated, Ivo, a diminutive of Ivan. An honest mistake!

Raphaël

W. D. Redfern, Michel Tournier, Le coq de bruyère:

Harry

"In Americans [the bourgeois family name] arouses a curious unease. To conceal the uncomfortable distance existing between particular people they call themselves Bob and Harry, like replaceable members of teams." — Horkheimer & Adorno

Étienne

Conversation, circa 2000—

Friend: Do you want to see Saint Etienne?
Hannah: Subbadubbah?
Friend: No, not Santana. Saint Etienne. They're on Sub Pop.

Isis

Isis is a lot like Lulu. Or is it more like Mimi?

X

Not El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—I went to high school with a wholly whitebread girl with the middle name of X, just X, just like Homer J. Simpson's middle name is just J. It was pronounced "ex," not "zuh" (as in Xavier) or "jhuh" (as in, I think, Xiomara and Ximena); it was, in other words, just X of the Roman alphabet, not X of Cyrillic (usually transliterated as "kh," and close to "ch" [as in Chanukkah] in sound, in my unprofessional opinion [very unprofessional, indeed, incorrect — ed.]). And let's not forget the X of Mandarin! No, let's! X. X. X. Just X.

If she changed her name, she could be ex-X. And someone she breaks up with could refer to her as "my ex, ex-X." And so on, x cetera.

Sisera

How neato was Jael when she rammed a fucking post through Sisera's skull?

Caden

I am not at all a fan of Charlie Kaufman—rare is the high-concept movie that does "it" for me—and Synecdoche, New York is no exception. "I think I have blood in my stool." "That stool in your office?" That is not clever writing, it is shitty writing.

But what lost me, really, because I am a pedant above all, was the name Caden, which is of only recent vintage (i.e., the early nineties). I wish, I guess, that Kaufman had just gone whole hog—named his protagonist not Caden but Cadence, even if it is a girl's name, or, better yet, since he's so into homophones, Kaydence. That'd, at least, have some guts.

Eulalie

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust:

"Well, now, that's Saint Hilaire, who in certain provinces is also called, you know, Saint Illiers, Saint Hélier, and even, in the Jura, Saint Ylie. And these various corruptions of sanctus Hilarius are not the most curious that have occurred in the names of the blessed. For instance, your own patron, my good Eulalie, sancta Eulalia—do what she is in Burgundy? Santi Éloi, quite simply: she has become a male saint. You see Eulalie?—after you die they will turn you into a man."

Gamaliel

What the "G" in Warren G. Harding stands for. Not what the "G" in G-spot stands for.

Warren

This name is cute because it is where bunnies live.

This name is not cute because Warren G. Harding was a stern-looking motherfucker.

Isannah

Paul Revere's dad was named Apollos Rivoire.

Paul Revere's siblings were named Deborah, Paul, Frances, Thomas, John, Mary, and Elizabeth. One of them married a woman named Silence.

Paul Revere had sixteen children: Deborah, Paul, Sarah, Mary, Frances, Mary, Elizabeth, Isannah, Joshua, John, Lucy, Harriet, John, Maria, and John.

Stetson

A cowboy name.

Here are some other names a cowboy could have:

• Wyatt
• Bill
• Rodeo
• Wayne
  
• Colt
• Beretta
• Rossi
• Winchester
• Remington
• Uzi
• Piece
  
• Glock