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?

Emoquette

The other day I received word from my health insurance about contraceptives soon to be covered at no charge. I thought I would do us all a favor and deem which ones had names suitable for humans (just in case, of course, your birth control should fail):

YES (i.e., names already more or less established in the United States of America) 
Leena

Errin [sic]

Camila   

Heather
Portia
Amethyst
Yasmin

MAYBE (i.e., names that bear at least a passing resemblance to more or less established names)
Aviane
Balziva
Jolivette
Velivet
Ocella
Amethia
Lessina
Alesse
Mircette
Kariva
Cyclessa
Gildess
Junel
Cryselle
Zarah
Zeosa
Jolessa
Loryna
Zovia
Briellyn
Natazia
Azurette
Aranelle
Orsythia
Emoquette

NO (i.e., names I thought were “Neocon” when I first read them)
Necon