Teddie

J. Hoberman reviews Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture (eds. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson):

American Writings includes the endearing “Talk With Teddie,” Kracauer’s notes following a 1960 visit with Theodor Adorno and his wife Gretel. According to Friedel (as Kracauer’s German friends called him), he jousted with Adorno over the logic of “Utopian thought” and, invoking Benjamin, told his friend that his vaunted dialectic was like a film consisting “exclusively of close-ups.” (Would that be Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc?) 

“You cannot upset Teddie,” Kracauer writes. “He grabs everything he is told, digests it and its consequences and then takes over in a spirit of superiority.” Still, he concludes, “in spite of its emptiness, Teddie’s output appears to be concrete and substantial. This semblance of fullness probably results from his aesthetic sensitivity.” Would it be unkind to make the same observation regarding Kracauer? 

 Oh, gosh. What are the chances I could get the Disney Channel to greenlight a series called Frankfurt Babies (or, duh, The Frankfurt Preschool), in which a bediapered and bebinkied Teddie and Friedel, together with their pals Wally B, Herbie, Horkie, and Habie, get themselves into (and out of) all modes of scrapes?

Ilan

 A few weekends ago I overheard two similar conversations.

In the first, an acquaintance was explaining how to pronounce his wife’s name: “Elana. EE-lana. Like ‘e-mail.’ ” In the second, a woman I had just met was describing how her three-year-old daughter, Elena, was adjusting to preschool: “ ‘No,’ she tells all her teachers. ‘It is e-LEH-na.’ ”

Now, don’t get me wrong. Our three-year-old Elena, as the bilingual daughter of two Mexican-Americans, undoubtedly bears the Spanish variant of Helen. Our Elana, meanwhile, who I know to be Jewish, probably bears an alternate transliteration of Ilana, the feminine form of Ilan, which means “tree” in Hebrew. (Elena Kagan, on the other hand, is almost certainly the bearer of the Russian Helen cognate; that she has a brother named Irving is indicative of the sorts of shifts that have taken place in the naming styles of American Jews in the past half-century.)

Nonetheless, these two incidents led me to reflect on how dearly some hold to the particular pronunciation of their names, and a how single vowel is enough to upend their sense of self. Again, don’t get me wrong—I understand that impulse, that need to dig in one’s heels, for indeed not a day goes by that I myself do not fall prey to a narcissism of small differences or have to say, “There is an aitch at the end,” or, “It is a palindrome.” Ilan should not be confused with élan. Milan, Spain, is not Milan, Ohio.

But what, I wonder, if it were?  

Edwina

Two memories:

1. Going grocery shopping with my mother, and her giving me a quarter at the end to get a gum ball or a toy or a fake tattoo from one of the machines near the exit; choosing the one with Bart Simpson on it; getting something, can’t remember what, wrapped in Simpsons trivia. Q: What is the name of Bart’s teacher? A: Edna Crabapple. Thinking this was the funniest name ever. I must have only recently learned to read. 
2. Acquiring two hand-me-down stuffed animals: two dogs. The big one we named Harvey, because its previous owner loved rabbits. The little one, we decided, was his wife—but what could her name possibly be? Didn’t Bart Simpson’s teacher have a funny name? A real mouthful? Ed-something. Something-na. Edwina, that was it.  

Elif

Elif Batuman, The Possessed:

Among the not very numerous theoretical texts I read as a literature major, one that made an especially strong impression on me was Foucault’s short essay on Don Quixote in The Order of Things, the one that likens the tall, skinny, weird-looking hidalgo to “a sign, a long, thin graphism, a letter that has just escaped from the open pages of a book.” I immediately identified with this description because elif, the Turkish word for alif or aleph—the first letter of the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets—is drawn as a straight line. My parents chose this name for me because I was an unusually long and skinny baby (I was born one month early).

Ead.,  “Stage Mothers”:

 A few years ago, a reporter asked Ümmiye if she knew the meaning of her name. She didn’t, and wasn’t pleased to learn that ümmi is Arabic for “illiterate.” (It’s one of the epithets of Muhammad, who is said to have been illiterate at the time he received the prophecies.) Üm is also the Arabic word for “mother,” and thus the two preoccupations of Ümmiye’s dramatic work—education and motherhood—are prefigured in her name. 

[...]

“Wool Doll,” the movie that Ümmiye finished shooting in the spring, is set among the Yörük, some thirty years ago. It tells the story of a mother and daughter, Hatice and Elif, who lead a life of oppression at the hands of Hatice’s mother-in-law. (Many of the daughters in Ümmiye’s plays are called Elif, which is the Turkish word for the first letter of the Arabic alphabet: to say that someone “doesn’t know elif” is to say that the person is illiterate.)

Igrushcha

 Sergei Eisenstein, “Names”:

 Somewhere, a very long time ago, Chukovsky very wittily defended the Futurists.

He found the same abstract charm in their euphonious nonsense as we find in Longfellow’s enumeration of Indian tribes. For us they too are utterly devoid of any sense, and their charm lies solely in the rhythm and phonetic features (in Hiawatha: “Came Comanches...” etc.).

Sometimes, when I start remembering things, I lapse into an utterly abstract chain of names and surnames.

The Pension Koppitz.

Igrushcha (the Germanized pronunciation of the diminutive of Igor). And Arsik (from Arseny, a wanton, dumpy, pallid and capricious individual of my age) from Moscow. Frau Schaub, with her little dog—and the ruddy-cheeked, bare-kneed Tolya Schaub.

Esther and Frieda.

Maka and Viba Strauch.

The architect, Felsko, from Riga, with his daughter—an aging spinster. And Mr. Torchiani, who had married her three years earlier. Frau Frisk from Norway, with the strange large earrings, brooches and rings.

Sapico-y-Sarra Lucqui, the Spanish consul.

Caspar

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady:

“Caspar Goodwood,” Ralph continued—“it’s a rather striking name.”

“I don’t care anything about his name. It might be Ezekiel Jenkins, and I should say the same.”  

Emily

My second entry inspired by Jay Leyda’s Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson is meant to assure all the Emilys born between 1996 and 2007, inclusive, that they are not alone:

Zebina

A riveting passage from the opening section of Jay Leyda’s Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (1960), made even more riveting if you are able to imagine that the names here refer not to specific people but to the names themselves:

Ostracized Harriet and paralyzed Zebina—daughter and son of Luke Montague and Irene Dickinson (sister of ED’s grandfather)—occupied a peculiar but important place in Amherst life and in the lives of their Dickinson cousins. Neither brother nor sister married, yet both were near marriage (2 Aug. 30; 20 Nov. 39), and the few documentary scraps that touch them deepen rather than clarify their mystery. For example, what were “the peculiar circumstances” of the Dickinson family referred to by Zebina (12 Oct. 31)? What was Harriet’s sin that deprived her of the communion of the church for six months (16 Jan. 45)? [...] ED’s earliest extant letter (18 April 42) mentions Zebina’s “fit,” and he reappears throughout her correspondence. His abundant contributions of comedy and history to the local press (30 Oct. 50; 10 Oct. 56; 2 Jan. 60) gave her at least one literary cousin. The verbose Personal History of Zebina C. Montague was prepared for a reunion of the Class of ’32. [...] In Around a Village Green, Mary Adele Allen describes a visit to the Montagues in 1872, after Harriet broke her hip: “As I entered the house, Mr. Zebina sat in a gay-flowered dressing-gown, his bright eyes aglow.”

Helen

The name, more properly, is HELEN. All caps, sans serif. This is a reasonable approximation of how my four-year-old first cousin, once removed, writes her name, at least from time to time.

Here, then, are some of the other ways she writes her name:

HNELE
HELNE
HEENL
HLNEE
HNLEE 
HLENE
HENEL
HEELN

Mogscha

This was, supposedly, the first name of the father of a certain Arthur Leonard Rosenberg, that is, Tony Randall. Now—and, granted, I haven’t yet checked the Dictionary of Ashkenazi Given Names, which might quickly disabuse me of the notion I am about to advance—but I do immediately wonder, upon encountering such a name, if it weren’t the product of a typographical error somewhere done the line.

Ralzemond

A friend asked me to investigate the origins of this name, which was borne by the man, a Ralzemond D. Parker, who filed patents like no. 1312572, for a “Secret-Signaling System.”

I am sorry to report that neither The Oxford Names Companion nor my expert Googling skills yielded much of anything about from whence this name might have come. Denmark? I cannot say. England? Perhaps. The Netherlands? Could very well be. I mean, “mond” means “mouth” in Dutch. (Other translations, according to Google Translate, include: opening, orifice, muzzle, kisser, aperture, embouchure, rictus, potato trap, outfall, potato box.) Let your imagination go hog-wild!

I did, though, turn up a biography of one Ralzemond A. Parker. I copy below the stuff I dug just ’cuz and put in bold those things with onomastic implications:

Ralzemond A. Parker was born in 1843, the son of Asher Bull Parker and Harriet Castle.  [...] Parker also apparently sold saws or worked with saw patents. [...] Later, he worked as Henry Ford’s patent lawyer and led the fight for automobile patent rights. [...] Parker was involved with the GAR [oh, if only this said GWAR — ed.], Oakland County Temperance Association, the Michigan State Chess Association, and the Union Veterans’ Patriotic League. Parker married Sarah Electa Drake, the daughter of Flemon Drake, M.D. [...] Some of his furniture was given to the Royal Oak Historical Society. Ralzemond is a family name which continues to be actively used among his descendants.

Things we can safely assume: 1) the “A” in Ralzemond A. Parker is “Asher”; 2) the “D” in Ralzemond D. Parker is “Drake.”

Things I amuse myself with assuming: 1) I, a Castle on my maternal grandmother’s side, am related to Ralzemond A. Parker.

Snowden

There are a handful of names to which I am irrationally drawn: I like how they look or I like how they sound, although I couldn’t give you an explanation any which way as to why. I am almost embarrassed to list these names, for fear of losing every last drop of my already parched credibility, but I also recognize that that same credibility thrives on honesty. So, in the interest of full disclosure, here are some of the names I like for no reason at all: Hart, Sally, Cloudesley, Snowden. The last of these is a new fixation. I should, I think, find it totally reprehensible, for it is little more than another awful transplanted surname with the added bonus of the ultimate feature of the loathsome Caden and the foul Camden—and yet time and again I catch myself sighing dreamily, Snowden...

Steve

Another thing about watching mid-century American animation, before I forget: you can, on the one hand, get a little cross-eyed from all the monosyllabic first names in the credits, but, on the other, you learn a little something about how men born around 1900 or 1910 were named and called.

So what if I can’t always keep my Arts (Landy, Riley, Stevens, Babbitt...) or Milts (Kahl, Gray, Banta, Gross, Schaffer...) or Kens (Anderson, O’Connor, Peterson, Hultgren...) straight—it is good to know they were out there, right?

And were these fellows born today, they would be probably go by Arthur and Kenneth (or Kenward) and Milton, full names (William instead of Bill, Robert instead of Bob) being a trend and all. That said, one thing that I encountered—and that, indeed, surprised me—in the two years I spent teaching undergraduates in Iowa was that there were far more 18-year-old (now 22-year-old) boys with names—and nicknames—that seemed a generation or so out-of-date than I would ever have expected. No Bills or Bobs, but a Glenn here, a Rick there, not to mention more than a few Steves.

I found myself thinking back to 1990. Was this student, the one bragging before class about how wasted he had been or was going to become, always called Steve? Even as a squishy little baby?

To call a baby Steve even as long as a couple decades ago seems unfathomable. And now? Are there any baby Steves? Most, I imagine, are simply Stevens, or Stevies, or—should their parents be particularly winsome—Stevedore. 

Heck

Were some of my previous entries not sufficiently clear on this matter, I watch a lot of cartoons.

This past week, for example, I took in a ton of Tex Avery’s MGM shorts.

One starts to notice things. That, for instance, Millionaire Droopy (1956) is identical to Wags to Riches (1949), except that it is in CinemaScope—and that its backgrounds have been updated to match the nineteen-fifties. Hence—

—gives way to—

—and so on.

One notices, too, the credits. The names that repeat, reappear. Tex. Fred. Bob.

And, my favorite—Heck. As in Heck Allen, as in Henry Wilson Allen, also known as Will Henry and Clay Fisher.

Heck! Add it, I insist, to your list of diminutives of Henry.

Hell

Last spring I was flipping through Ivor Montagu’s With Eisenstein in Hollywood (1969) when my eyes happened to settle on this image—

—How so very strange!, I thought. What was Hell doing in Chaplin’s pool, and whosoever knew that Hell was a woman?

Ah, but how quickly our fancies dissipate: Hell, it turns out, was born Eileen Hellstern.

Yet, lucky for me, a new fancy soon congealed, for while it is clear that Hell Montagu’s nickname was derived from her maiden name, one might also imagine an instance in which Hell could be short for Eileen, being as it is on occasion an Irish variant of Helen—making Mrs. Montagu Hell twice over, hell, the Hell of Hells.

Nomolos

“Nomolos is a very nice name,” says my five-year-old nephew, Solomon.

Michael

There was a dark time in my life—let us just call it “high school”—when I stayed up until 2 AM most every Saturday night watching two syndicated episodes of ER back-to-back. You wouldn’t have known it from looking at me—or, indeed, from talking with me, for I like to think I was very good at pretending to have watched every last minute of the previous weekend’s Saturday Night Live and Showtime at the Apollo—but at some point in my adolescence I developed very strong attachments to the plot lines that developed and cast members who emerged in those golden seasons between the departure of Sherry Stringfield and the return of Sherry Stringfield.

There were some notable exceptions, of course, the most notable being any and all plot lines involving the cast member Michael Michele, whom I remember only for how terrible she was and—what brings me here now—her name, which I always regarded as an adding-insult-to-injury kind of deal, like, "It is one thing that her first name is Michael, but then to have her last name be Michele!" 

But I am older, and wiser, and on reflection what was once puzzlement has slipped into something resembling admiration. It helps, too, that during an equally dark period of my life, my early twenties, I moved to Chicago for the first time, where I took this photograph:

I never would have believed you if you had told me when I was fifteen that I would one day seek solace in an intersection that evokes Dr. Peter Benton. But people change. They grow, they open themselves up to the possibility of new experiences and new takes on things. I still find Michael Michele's name remarkable, her acting less than passable, but nonetheless I thank her.

Ichabod

Ichabod, what a name
Kind of odd but nice just the same

Themistocleus

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls:

 After another contest for the honour of yielding precedence, Chichikov succeeded in making his way (in zigzag fashion) to the dining-room, where they found awaiting them a couple of youngsters. These were Manilov's sons, and boys of the age which admits of their presence at table, but necessitates the continued use of high chairs. Beside them was their tutor, who bowed politely and smiled; after which the hostess took her seat before her soup plate, and the guest of honour found himself esconsed between her and the master of the house, while the servant tied up the boys' necks in bibs.

"What charming children!" said Chichikov as he gazed at the pair. "And how old are they?"

"The eldest is eight," replied Manilov, "and the younger one attained the age of six yesterday."

"Themistocleus," went on the father, turning to his first-born, who was engaged in striving to free his chin from the bib with which the footman had encircled it. On hearing this distinctly Greek name (to which, for some unknown reason, Manilov always appended the termination "eus"), Chichikov raised his eyebrows a little, but hastened, the next moment, to restore his face to a more befitting expression.

"Themistocleus," repeated the father, "tell me which is the finest city in France."

Upon this the tutor concentrated his attention upon Themistocleus, and appeared to be trying hard to catch his eye. Only when Themistocleus had muttered "Paris" did the preceptor grow calmer, and nod his head.

"And which is the finest city in Russia?" continued Manilov.

Again the tutor's attitude became wholly one of concentration.

"St. Petersburg," replied Themistocleus.

"And what other city?"

"Moscow," responded the boy.

"Clever little dear!" burst out Chichikov, turning with an air of surprise to the father. "Indeed, I feel bound to say that the child evinces the greatest possible potentialities."

"You do not know him fully," replied the delighted Manilov. "The amount of sharpness which he possesses is extraordinary. Our younger one, Alkid, is not so quick; whereas his brother—well, no matter what he may happen upon (whether upon a cowbug or upon a water-beetle or upon anything else), his little eyes begin jumping out of his head, and he runs to catch the thing, and to inspect it. For HIM I am reserving a diplomatic post. Themistocleus," added the father, again turning to his son, "do you wish to become an ambassador?"

"Yes, I do," replied Themistocleus, chewing a piece of bread and wagging his head from side to side.

At this moment the lacquey who had been standing behind the future ambassador wiped the latter's nose; and well it was that he did so, since otherwise an inelegant and superfluous drop would have been added to the soup.  

Elliott

From some old Elliott Smith bio: 

At some point in high school, he had started to be known to a few close friends as Elliott, which soon became his preferred name. Elliott recalled: "When I was in high school I hated my name and, um, somebody started calling me ... uh, Elliott, and I still haven't gotten it legally changed. ... I didn't like that my first name started with the same letter as my last name. That really irritated me. And also, like, there's no good versions of it, ya know like there's, Steven ... Steven is like sort of too ... hard to say, and kind of like, bookish. Steve is like ... like jockish, sorta. Big handsome Steve, big shirtless Steve, ya know, like football playin' blond haired Steve. Ya know? I didn't like it.". . . At one point, Elliott announced that his full new name was Elliott Stillwater Otter Smith. (The spelling of the name Elliott may have been derived from Elliott Street in Portland; it cuts diagonally through Ladd's Circle connecting to Division.)

N.B. Usually my portraits look nothing like anybody in particular. This one, though, I gotta say, reminds me of a certain E[l]liot[t] Spitzer.  

Elliott

Ann Beattie, Picturing Will:

He didn’t ask where she got a name like Elliott. People who had money often named baby girls for their uncles, deceased. Or they gave babies an important surname they didn’t want lost when a woman took her husband’s name—they put it first, like a person with a sweet tooth who eats the dessert before the meal. As a baby, did they call her Ellie?  

Quinn

I read Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy a few months ago. It was fine. Postmodernism Lite. A totally readable bunch of books. About a third as clever and profound as they think themselves to be, but I suppose that is still reasonably clever and/or profound. A case in point, from City of Glass:

 “It’s not that I dislike strangers per se. It’s just that I prefer not to speak to anyone who does not introduce himself. In order to begin, I must have a name.”

“But once a man gives you his name, he’s no longer a stranger.’ ‘

“Exactly. That’s why I never talk to strangers.”

Quinn had been prepared for this and knew how to answer. He was not going to let himself be caught. Since he was technically Paul Auster, that was the name he had to protect. Anything else, even the truth, would be an invention, a mask to hide behind and keep him safe.

“In that case,” he said, “I’m happy to oblige you. My name is Quinn.”

 “Ah,” said Stillman reflectively, nodding his head. “Quinn.”

 “Yes. Quinn. Q-U-I-N-N.”

“I see. Yes, yes, I see. Quinn. Hmmmm. Yes. Very interesting. Quinn. A most resonant word. Rhymes with twin, does it not?”

“That’s right. Twin.”

“And sin, too, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not.”

“And also in—one n— or inn—two. Isn’t that so?”

“Exactly.”

“Hmmm. Very interesting. I see many possibilities for the word, this Quinn, this...quintessence...of quiddity. Quick, for example. And quill. And quack. And quirk. Hmmm. rhymes with grin. Not to speak of kin. Hmmm. Very interesting. And win. And fin. And gin. And pin. And tin. And bin. Hmmm. Even rhymes with djinn. Hmmm. And if you say it right, with been. Hmmm. Yes, very interesting. I like your name, enormously, Mr. Quinn. It flies off in so many little directions at once.”

“Yes, I’ve often noticed that myself.”

“Most people don’t pay attention to such things. They think of words as stones, as great unmovable objects with no life, as monads that never change.”

“Stones can change. They can be worn away by wind or water. They can erode. They can be crushed. You can turn them into shards, or gravel, or dust.” 

Now, one might contend that this exchange ultimately differs little from the passage I quoted from Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams a couple weeks ago, the one that ended with the thing about “meaning, if it existed at all”—and, sure, you would be right that both writers here use names to advance a thesis about words. But where I find Moore’s observations wry and charming (mostly—A Gate at the Stairs was dreck), Auster’s are, I think, ponderously absurd.

And, ’sides, I just disagree with him! For how can I not, when Frank O’Hara’s “Today” will always be my favorite poem?

         Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas!
         You really are beautiful! Pearls,
         harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all
         the stuff they've always talked about

         still makes a poem a surprise!
         These things are with us every day
         even on beachheads and biers. They
         do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

Glenn

It has always delighted me that Glenn Beck (b. 1964) and Glenn Greenwald (b. 1967) share a first name. However different they might be otherwise, they nonetheless have in common parents who admired John Glenn—or who, at the very least, unwittingly tapped into the zeitgeist he wrought.   

Sofonisba

I read Sanford Schwartz’s “The Moment of Moroni,” which appears in August 16, 2012, issue of the New York Review of Books, ’cuz I thought it might have something to with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Turns out it was just about some painter dude. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when, in his discussion of the 2004 “Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy” exhibit at the Met, Schwartz remarked, “Among the few painters to make immediately distinct impressions were Moroni and the slightly younger Sofonisba Anguissola, who was represented by riveting paintings and drawings of herself and of her family members.”

Sofonisba! Sure, it’s no Sophronia, but it’ll do.

Rob

The Russian word for slave is раб—that is, rab, or, well, Rob.

Fear not, my dear Roberts and Robertos and Robertas and Robins! Just remember that whosoever should think this license to tease you is herself or himself a (and say this with me in your best Joisey accent) Slavic-speaker. 

Camden

When one frequents baby name blogs and discussion boards, as I do, one begins to be able to anticipate the jokes. A classic: all that the parents of infant Holdens demonstrate is that they never read a novel after high school (the phonies!). Another joke I see quite a bit comes in the form of observing the relative popularity of Camden (which ranked #160 in 2011, with 2,391 baby boys by that name) and Trenton (which got as high as #178 in 2000 and again in 2007; 1,811 births in 2011). That is the whole joke, that observation, though I suppose it should be accompanied by an eye roll or a finger wag for maximum effect. Let me put this another way: Trenton, by being around the 178th most popular male name in America, is about as popular as Gary was two decades ago.

Of course, no one would accuse a parent of a Gary of naming their sweet, darling baby after Gary, Indiana. (Not even Gary Indiana’s parents!)

Trenton and Camden, on the other hand, immediately—well, for those who are rolling theirs eyes and wagging their figures—summon up two of the poorest cities in New Jersey. This is not the reason for their popularity, of course. We can attribute that to the fact that they both end in the letter n (think Mason, Jackson, Landon) and  can double as surnames (think Mason, Jackson, Landon). Trenton has the added bonus of yielding the previously established name Trent as a nickname, as Jackson yields Jack or Lillian Lily, while Camden conjures up visions of Cameron and Caden.

For those who remain unconvinced by the appeal of these names, I offer little assurance. Take comfort, I suppose, in your refined taste, your superior knowledge. You are a good person.

And here is a new joke for you. It might require a little practice, but I am sure you will soon be a pro. “Trenton? Camden?” you start off with. “Why those cities? If you’re going to name your little one after some Garden State hellhole, why not choose an especially wealthy hellhole? Names should be aspirational, like Bentley and Tiffany, or like Toms River, like Rumson, like Teterboro, like Ho-Ho-Kus. What is wrong with a toddling Sea Girt, a puckish Tewksbury, a scrumptious Tenafly, a swaddled Cranbury, a wee Wyckoff, a colic Mahwah?”

Your interlocutor, if he or she is hip to your jive, can then chime in: “Aspirational, schmaspirational. There is nothing wrong with the culture of our country’s lumpenproletariat. They must learn to love themselves as much as they love the Insane Clown Posse. So, on Camden, on Trenton, I say! May your best buds be Perth Amboy and Egg Harbor and Tavistock! May the girl you knock up between paint huffs be Orange! May your first-born be . . . Elizabeth!” 

Grant

The recent post “Quiz: America’s Local Name Styles” by Laura Wattenberg at her Baby Name Wizard blog—

I've collected the top 3 most characteristic names for girls and boys from eight states [Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Wisconsin]. These aren't necessarily the most popular choice, but rather the names most disproportionately popular in that state compared to the rest of the country. To me, these names feel like a tour of eight distinct parts of the country. Can you match the names to the states? 

—is exactly the sort of thing that sets my heart a-pitter-pat. Required reading! Scroll down to comment #23 for the answers and a follow-up quiz, in which Grant is showcased.

Lancel

The vagaries of taste! A line of dialogue from the third episode of the first season of Game of Thrones:  “Lancel. Gods, what a stupid name. Lancel Lannister. Who named you, some half-wit with a stutter?”

One wonders what—in a world populated by Cerseis and Galbarts and Tobhos and Viseryses and Waymars and Theons—makes Lancel any stupider than any other name. Is it simply its pairing with Lannister that singles it out? If his name were Lancel Stark or Lancel Baratheon, would he be subject to the same derision? And if Theon Greyjoy were named Theon Baratheon, would he, too, fall prey to Robert’s lacerating wit?

(My brother, a few weeks ago: “I was going to live-tweet my reading of Game of Thrones sentence by sentence, but I misspelled a character’s name in the very first one.”)

Naum

From Benjamin Hale’s “The Last Distinction?: Talking to the Animals” in this month’s Harper’s:

 Proving that an animal could be “taught” to communicate by language—as narrowly conceived by [Noam] Chomsky—became a holy grail for language researchers. Herbert Terrace sought this prize by way of Nim Chimpsky.

There is something glib and thoughtless about bestowing on another conscious being a pun for a name. Glibness and thoughtlessness, as one sees in the documentary [Project Nim], are just a couple of Terrace’s winning traits, and Nim Chimpsky’s name was only the first indignity in a life full of indignity and suffering, which is the main subject of Marsh’s film. 

You know, I don’t know. I just don’t know. What separates “bestowing on another conscious being a pun for a name” from “naming your child after yourself or another loved one”? I just don’t see there being all that much of difference between having yourself generations of Anthonys and what Hale perceives as symptomatic of Terrace’s abusiveness.  Is Ramon Jr. different in degree or in kind from Nomar?

My partner, Jacob, was named after his great-grandfather Israel—and might we not think of wrestling with angels as simply another term for the highest form of wordplay?

Maybe I am sensitive here. As I have described elsewhere, it was not until the seventh or eighth grade that I came to like my own first and middle names, Hannah Maitland, and this was only because, as I then realized—I was attending a friend’s dance performance at Dance Theater Workshop, this I so clearly remember—“Hannah Maitland” contains the word “animate” and, in full, nearly rhymes with “animation.” How could I dislike a name, I reasoned, that seemed to forecast my lifelong obsession with cartoons?

And does not the fact that she calls them Roc and Roe singlehandedly redeem Mariah Carey’s decision to name her son and daughter Moroccan and Monroe?

I think, too, about a name that, like Noam and Nim—and name—begins with an n sound and ends in an m one: Naum. I have once before discussed it in conjunction with Noam, but I should I clarify that, as far as I can tell, the two names are etymologically distinct. Noam is like Naomi, while Naum, the alternative spelling of Naoum notwithstanding, is not. But I would not look askance at you if, say, you decided to name your son Naum in commemoration of his great-grandfather Noam. Would that be glib?

I, meanwhile, would choose to name a son Naum for a wholly different, but no less (it would seem) glib, reason: its resemblance to “zaum”—in English, “transreason,” “transration,” or (my preferred translation, courtesy of Paul Schmidt) “beyonsense.” Working backwards, that would make Naum mean not “comforter” but something like “in mind” or “to[wards] reason” or “in a sense” (“innocence”? “incensed”?).

Ah, show me a monkey capable of such reasoning and I will gladly be his uncle!

Leonard

I have never watched The Big Bang Theory. I will never watch The Big Bang Theory.  But, look, you tell me that the show is about two nerds named Sheldon and Leonard, one of whom lusts after a woman named Penny, and there is no way I don’t automatically compute that as, “This show is about two Jews and a shiksa.”

I don’t care that Sheldon and Leonard were supposedly named after Sheldon Leonard—a Jew of course, by the way—and  I don’t care that one of the show’s creators—the one who also wrote the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles theme song—is Jewish. These things don’t change the facts. The nerdiest Leonard there will ever be? Leonard Nimoy—Jewish! Virtually every famous Sheldon except Sheldon Turnipseed? Jewish! Oh, and I don’t care, furthermore, whether or not the characters themselves are in fact Jewish: they are Jewish. 

Serious

Renata Adler, Speedboat: 

 At the woman’s college where I went, we had distinguished faculty in everything, digs at Nuoro and Mycenae. We had a quality of obsession in our studies. For professors who had quarrelled with their wives at breakfast, those years of bright-eyed young women, never getting any older, must have been a trial. The head of the history department once sneezed into his best student’s honors thesis. He slammed it shut. It was ultimately published. When I was there, a girl called Cindy Melchior was immensely fat. She wore silk trousers and gilt mules. One day, in the overheated classroom, she laid aside her knitting and lumbered to the window, which she opened. Then she lumbered back. “Do you think,” the professor asked, “you are so graceful?” He somehow meant it kindly. Cindy wept. That year, Cindy’s brother Melvin phoned me. “I would have called you sooner,” he said, “but I had the most terrible eczema.” All the service staff on campus in those days were black. Many of them were followers of Father Divine. They took new names in the church. I remember the year when a maid called Serious Heartbreak married a janitor called Universal Dictionary. At the meeting of the faculty last fall, the college president, who is new and male, spoke of raising money. A female professor of Greek was knitting—and working on Linear B, with an abacus before her. In our time, there was a vogue for madrigals. Some of us listened, constantly, to a single record. There was a phrase we could not decipher. A professor of symbolic logic, a French Canadian, had sounds that matched but a meaning that seemed unlikely: Sheep are no angels; come upstairs. A countertenor explained it, after a local concert: She’d for no angel’s comfort stay. Correct, but not so likely either.  

Lia

In 2008, the indomitable Laura Wattenberg selected “Cullen” as one of the names of the year:

Our token non-political name makes the grade with a double-hit on two of the year's biggest cultural events. At the Beijing Olympics swimmer Cullen Jones was part of the record-setting U.S. 4x100 Freestyle Relay relay team, and made headlines as one of the first African-American swimming stars.  In movie theaters, Edward Cullen was an undead heartthrob.  As the teen-vampire sensation Twilight moved from book to screen, countless more adolescent girls added the name Cullen to their future-baby list.  In January, Cullen was barely on the radar as a baby name; from now on it's a player.

Four years have passed. The 2012 London Olympics are upon us. On the United States swimming team is another young swimming-star-in-the-making, Lia Neal, whose first name taps into the current taste for L-names like Leah, Lily, and Lila. Take heed, prognosticators!

But, trends aside (and I am notoriously bad at predicting them anyhow), I am smitten with this nugget from the recent New York Times profile of the swimmer:

Siu and Rome Neal are each 59, and their relationship reflects a deep-seated belief in possibility.... When he was a year old, in 1953, Rome (his given name, Jerome, was shortened by his mother) moved to New York City from Sumter, S.C., as his family sought relief from the suffocating racial oppression in the South.

Siu and her family immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong when she was 18 to join her grandfather. “We were looking for a better life,” she said.

Rome’s family settled in Harlem before moving to Brooklyn. Siu’s family initially moved to the Bronx before also heading to Brooklyn. They met at New York City Community College, married and had three sons: Rome Kyn, Smile and Treasure.

On Feb. 13, 1995, the Neals had the daughter they had long hoped for. Rome wanted to name her Kujichagulia in honor of the second principle of Kwanzaa, self-determination. He was voted down. They settled on Lia. She speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandarin.        

Ah, but was he, in fact, “voted down”? For, as careful readers will note, Lia’s name appears to be derived from the last three letters of Kujichagulia, just as Rome sprang from Jerome—and we might, as a consequence, understand the decision to name her Lia as a compromise, not a concession, on her father’s part, and one that, moreover, follows the trail blazed by his mother.

ZaSu

When the author of CHEW ON THIS embarked on nineteen-month hiatus back in October 2010, she left behind a list of names on which she planned to do entries. To wit:

Eusebius
Woodville
Otway
Kenelm
Annwyl
Lupu
Dugald
ZaSu

Over a year and a half later, she can remember only what drew her to the last of these.

But where did she come across the others? What about them struck her fancy? Do they share some common element that she, whether she knows it or not, must comprehend, must absorb?

Most, but not all, are two syllables.

Nearly every name on the list has either a u or a w. If we count the m in Kenelm as an upside-down w —or its n as an upside-down u—then, indeed, every name on the list has either a u or a w.

A few are also surnames.

What novels was she reading back then? Her diary tells us In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way, Sodom and Gomorrah, Victorine, A Frolic of His Own, A Family and a Fortune. She is afraid to revisit these, for fear of what she might find out.

Benna

Lorrie Moore, Anagrams:

When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, “Donna who?” I would say, “Donna Gilbert.” I thought Bing Crosby and Bill Cosby were the same person. That Buddy Holly and Billie Holiday were the same person. That Leon Trotsky and Leo Tolstoy were the same person. It was a shock for me quite late in life to discover that Jean Cocteau and Jacques Cousteau were not even related. Meaning, if it existed at all, was unstable and could not survive the slightest reshuffling of letters. 

Bella

One thing I appreciate about the name Stephenie Meyer gave her heroine is its subtle evocation of Mr. Lugosi, the quintessential Dracula.

Kind of like how what I always admired most about the Star Wars franchise is that it lets me imagine a lot of fanboys being really pissed at György Lukács.

Arundel

The history of the American animation industry yields some excellent names.

There are the nicknames: Bugs (Joseph Hardaway), Friz (Isadore Freleng), T. Hee (Thornton Hee), Tish-Tash (Frank Tashlin), Grim (Myron Natwick), Shamus (James Culhane), Bobe (Robert Cannon), Tex (Frederick Avery), Vip (Virgil Partch).

There are the Walts—Disney and Lantz and Kelly and Peregoy.

There are the character names, too, of course. It is thanks to Mr. Magoo, after all, that I have my own nickname, Goose. I am most fond of an early Disney triumvirate: Julius (the Cat), Oswald (the Lucky Rabbit), and Mortimer (later Mickey Mouse). And even Daffy Duck brings us perilously close to Dafydd, a Welsh form of David (other variants, including diminutives, I dig: Dudel, Taffy, Daveth, Taavetti, Dewey).

Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising together produced sound cartoons under the moniker Harman-Ising, including a series called, appropriately, Happy Harmonies.  When Ub (born Ubbe Eert, sometimes credited as U.B.) Iwerks joined forces with Walt Disney, Iwerks’s name went first, lest they sound like an ophthalmologist. Now there is an experimental animation festival named after him.

Disney’s family tree is particularly fruitful. There is Roy, yes, and more than a couple Kepples (who I like to pretend were actually Koppels), and my personal favorite, Disney’s Great-Grandpa Arundel. 

Jere

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon at work:

In late May I read Jeré Longman’s account of racism in the world of soccer, which provides me with insight, however illusory, into the demographics behind the name Ashley.

In early June, while conducting research on early color cartoons, I read an article by Jere Guldin, the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s Senior Film Preservationist.

A couple weeks later, I watch the first and second seasons of Justified, with recurring guest star Jere Burns.

Ashley

Back in May, Jeré Longman’s “Racism and Soccer Are in Play at a Big Event in East Europe” appeared in the New York Times. I wish to draw your attention to the following:

In 2011, the Bulgarian soccer federation was fined after fans made monkey chants toward the English players Theo Walcott, Ashley Young ... and Ashley Cole during a European qualifying match in Sofia.... Ashley Walcott, the brother of the English wing Theo Walcott, said recently on Twitter that the family was avoiding Euro 2012 “because of the fear of possible racist attacks/confrontation.”

Three Ashleys. All men, all born in the eighties, all English, all British African Caribbean.

I know very, very, very little about naming trends outside of the United States. I know that names like Alfie are popular in Britain, and that names like Graham come freighted with certain class and age associations, although I could not tell you exactly what those associations are.

I know very, very, very, very, very little about naming trends in mid-eighties England. Whereas I can say something somewhat profound, if perfunctory, about what a given name tells us about race and class in the United States, I am at a total loss when it comes to how these things bear out elsewhere.

Do the three Ashleys cited above reflect an actual naming phenomenon? Is there is a popular culture figure we can identify as its primary source? Is there a significant number of twenty- and thirtysomething white Englishmen named Ashley? Who, if anyone, is being named Ashley these days? Male babies? Female babies? The children of immigrants? The brothers (or sisters) of Alfies?

Jo Ann

Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (see also: Sophronia):

 Graduate school regulations at the University of Colorado required me to use my legal name, hence the author’s name listed on both my thesis and my dissertation is Jo Ann Barnett Shipps. (I adopted Jan as a nickname in 1946, when, as a sixteen-year-old, I entered Alabama College for Women, now Montevallo University. I was housed in Old Main, a dormitory in which at least a dozen other students named Jo Ann were living. My adopted name stuck, and even to members of my own family I have been Jan since then. Jan is the name on my Social Security card and the IRS also knows me as Jan. But I still get the odd inquiry about who this Jo Ann Shipps might be.)

Three points:

1.  I quite like, no joke, how she is compelled to make mention of the fact that her school changed its name, too.  
2. A cursory review of naming data from Shipps’s year of birth, 1929, illuminates little the overall popularity of the name Jo Ann. I do know this, though: Joan was about as popular as Mia is now; there were a fair number of Josephines, many of whom I am sure were Josephine Anns who went by Jo Ann; there were, too, a sizable number of Joannes, approximately as many as there were Reagans or Kendalls in 2011; the just Jos roughly equal the current number of Aniyahs; Joanna, Johanna, and Josefina were each given to only 200 or so babies, which is about the same number of babies each named Promise, Unique, and Bonnie last year. 
3. Jan, meanwhile, was given to a mere 45 female babies (and 28 male babies). There were more female Howards that same year.

Benny

Growing up, I knew someone named Benny. Not Benjamin, not Ben. Not Benedict, either, and not Benito. Not Penny, not Benna. Benny. Just Benny.

The reason was, he was named after Jack Benny.

I think that is truly marvelous.

But if I were his parents, and I really wanted to go the whole hog, I’d’ve named my bouncing bundle Kubelsky. 

Derwent

To My Future Biographers:

When it comes time for you to raid the contents of my bookshelves so as to glean meaning from my marginalia, be aware that I was thinking of you, at least as far as my copy of Susan Howe’s The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History is concerned. The sole thing I highlighted—in a stunning orange—in the entire work appears on page 34 in the chapter “Submarginalia,” and it is but a single word, two syllables—the name of one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sons. Not Hartley. Not Berkeley. Derwent.

Yours,
Hannah 

Roy

Did you know that Walt Disney, in addition to having a brother named Roy, also had a brother named Raymond? And that Raymond went by Ray? Not to mention their kid sister, who was named Ruth.

That is just fucked up.

Addendum: Just imagine, like, what if one of the Disney siblings couldn’t pronounce his or her Rs? Then they would have a Walt, a Woy, and Way, and a Wuth. And a Hewbewt, but no matter.

Dustin-Leigh

When I was informed that the Hairpin had compiled a list of Miss America contestant names for our perusment (that is, perusal and amusement), I admit that I was skeptical. This would be like shooting babies in a barrel, taking candy from a fish: easy targets, surely, and commensurate laughs. But the compiler, as she had with her lists of Puritan names and Civil War General names, instead demonstrated  a ear for rhythm and rhyme above, say, misogyny or classism. There is, on the lists I admire, lovely alliteration (Denby Dung, Wildeana Withers, Arian Archer, Victor Vifquain, Freita Fuller, Patience Panski), almost spoonerisms (Wager Swayne), beautiful incongruities (Creature Cheeseman, Unfeigned Panckhurst, Gideon Johnson Pillow, Rosanna Bean, Sara Frankenstein, Chastity Hardman), pages ripped from Dickens and Pynchon (Manning Force,  Zealous Tower, Faithful Teate, Joan Teets, Josette Huntress, Tonya Virgin), and the simply glorious (Galusha Pennypacker, If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned Barebone, Kill-sin Pimple)—as well as all manners of Leighs, from Cheryl-Leigh Buffum to Gayla Leigh Shoemake to Dustin-Leigh Konzelman, the poor dear.
  

Sophronia

I was tempted, I confess, to do a post on one of the many names featured over at the Utah Baby Namer—Pyrlynd, M'Kay, D’Loaf, Phakelikaydenicia, Desdedididawn, Leviathan!—or at least on Mitt Romney’s monosyllabic quintet—Tagg, Craig, Matt, Ben, Josh—but while reading Jan Shipps’s excellent Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition I came across this name, and I was transformed. After all, how can one be mean-spirited when one possesses the knowledge that there live and have lived women—Joseph Smith’s sister among them—named Sophronia?