Llewelyn

Having never read the book on which it was based—and not knowing many out-and-proud Welshmen—I first encountered the name Llewelyn in the Coen Brothers' filmic adaptation of No Country for Old Man. Trust me, I was confused: I spent the entire movie turning the name of Josh Brolin's character over in my head. Was it spelled Lou-Ellen? LuEllen? Was there something I was missing, like was Ellen once a traditional male name, à la Evelyn? Was he French? The French, after all, love their hyphenated names: Jacques-Yves, Henri-Georges. And several of these hyphenated names confuse my rigid, dogmatic, puritanical, and distinctly American sense of the gender to which it belongs, e.g., Jean-Marie. Was he, then, something to the effect of Louis-Alain?

Needless to say, I am excited to see the new film by the Coen Brothers: Inside Llewyn Davis. 

Bonja

Herman Melville, Mardi:

"First, I lay it down for an indubitable maxim, that in itself all posthumous renown, which is the only renown, is valueless. Be not offended, my lord. To the nobly ambitious, renown hereafter may be something to anticipate. But analyzed, that feverish typhoid feeling of theirs may be nothing more than a flickering fancy, that now, while living, they are recognized as those who will be as famous in their shrouds, as in their girdles." 

Said Yoomy, "But those great and good deeds, Babbalanja, of which the philosophers so often discourse: must it not be sweet to believe that their memory will long survive us; and we ourselves in them?" 

"I speak now," said Babbalanja, "of the ravening for fame which even appeased, like thirst slaked in the desert, yields no felicity, but only relief; and which discriminates not in aught that will satisfy its cravings. But let me resume. Not an hour ago, Braid-Beard was telling us that story of prince Ottimo, who inodorous while living, expressed much delight at the prospect of being perfumed and embalmed, when dead. But was not Ottimo the most eccentric of mortals? For few men issue orders for their shrouds, to inspect their quality beforehand. Far more anxious are they about the texture of the sheets in which their living limbs lie. And, my lord, with some rare exceptions, does not all Mardi, by its actions, declare, that it is far better to be notorious now, than famous hereafter?" 

"A base sentiment, my lord," said Yoomy. "Did not poor Bonja, the unappreciated poet, console himself for the neglect of his contemporaries, by inspiriting thoughts of the future?" 

"In plain words by bethinking him of the glorious harvest of bravos his ghost would reap for him," said Babbalanja; "but Banjo,—Bonjo,— Binjo,—I never heard of him. 

"Nor I," said Mohi. 

"Nor I," said Media. 

"Poor fellow!" cried Babbalanja; "I fear me his harvest is not yet ripe." 

"Alas!" cried Yoomy; "he died more than a century ago." 

"But now that you speak of unappreciated poets, Yoomy," said Babbalanja, "Shall I give you a piece of my mind?" "Do," said Mohi, stroking his beard. 

"He, who on all hands passes for a cypher to-day, if at all remembered hereafter, will be sure to pass for the same. For there is more likelihood of being overrated while living, than of being underrated when dead. And to insure your fame, you must die." 

"A rather discouraging thought for your race. But answer: I assume that King Media is but a mortal like you; now, how may I best perpetuate my name?" 

Long pondered Babbalanja; then said, "Carve it, my lord, deep into a ponderous stone, and sink it, face downward, into the sea; for the unseen foundations of the deep are more enduring than the palpable tops of the mountains."

Icky

Why, this is a nickname for Ichabod, of course. To wit, from Walt Disney's Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949):

And the same note, as rendered in Ub Iwerks's Headless Horseman (1934):

George

A friend of a friend (there are not enough scare quotes in the world to distance myself from either) shared this in his Facebook newsfeed:

To counteract the turning of my stomach and the crawling of my skin and the running of shivers down my spine and a whole other host of aches and ailments I have since been struck with, come down with, and fallen prey to, I think I ought to provide a list of a semi-decent human beings named George or a variant of George. So, move over Zimmerman, Wallace, Bushes, Romney, et al.:

Yuri Norstein
Jürgen Habermas
György Lukács
Jiří Trnka
Georgia Hubley
Joris Ivens
George Winston Lee
Jorge Luis Borges
George Michael Bluth
Georges Méliès
Georges-Pierre Seurat
George Eliot
Yuri Lotman
Georges Perec

And, in conclusion: Xurxo is, supposedly, the Galician version of George. Fucking awesome.

Mazoltuv

I have felt—felt, not thought, not believed, for indeed what I experienced pierced me—for several years now that the most poignant part of the case recounted in Janet Malcolm's Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (to which she then returned in a three-part series for the New York Review of Books) was the first name of Iphigenia's mother: not Clytemnestra, but Mazoltuv.

Skip

First there was Doodles Weaver, the Arachne of stick-figures.

Then there was Skip Collector, the Eduard Fuchs of jumprope. 

YHWH

Gershom Scholem, "In Jewish Mysticism," in On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism:

[The] basic idea of the Torah as the Name of God was the source of certain other Kabbalistic developments. It goes without saying that such an assertion about the Torah does not refer to the document written in ink on a scroll of parchment, but to the Torah as a pre-existential being, which preceded everything else in the world....
One of the most important variants of this theory occurs in Joseph Gikatila, a leading Spanish Kabbalist who wrote at the end of the thirteenth century... In his view, the Torah is not itself the name of God but the explication of the Name of God. To him the Name meant exactly what it had meant for the Jewish tradition, namely the tetragrammaton, which is the one and only true name of God. He writes: "Know that the entire Torah is, as it were, an explication, and commentary on, the tetragrammaton YHWH."

Later, in the same essay, Scholem quotes Pinhas of Koretz:

Indeed it is true that the holy Torah was originally created as an incoherent jumble of letters. In other words, all the letters of the Torah, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy, were not yet combined to form the words we now read, such as "In the beginning God created" or "Go from thy land," and so on. These words, on the contrary, were not yet present, for the events of Creation that they record had not yet taken place. Thus all the letters of the Torah were indeed jumbled, and only when a certain event occurred in the world did the letters combine to form the words in which the event is related.... As soon as something happened, the corresponding combination of letters came into being. If another event had occurred in its place, other combinations of letters would have arisen....

Tyler

Becky Barrow, reporting (I use the term generously) for the Daily Mail:

[Former Apprentice contestant Katie] Hopkins claimed children called Tyler, Chardonnay and Charmain are less likely to have done their homework and been disruptive at school, claims dismissed by her fellow guest as "snortworthy."
She went on to insist she hates any child named after a footballer, a season, a geographical location—even though one of her children is called India—and a celebrity. 

Snortworthy. Now that is name!

Gansevoort

Given 1) my documented obsession with Herman Melville and 2) my lifelong nickname (Goose), you should pretty much assume at this point that my firstborn son is going to be named Gansevoort.

Of course, don't discount the possibility of him being named Shelduck, after 1) my late father, Sheldon, and 2) the genus Tadorna.

Topher

Although I born midst the heyday of Christophers (anecdotal evidence: there were three in my high school graduating class of 62 students), I didn't hear of the nickname Topher until 1998, when That '70s Show premiered. The entrance of Topher Grace into my consciousness (if not necessarily my heart, which, for a brief, embarrassing moment, was reserved for Ashton Kutcher) came only a year after the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which introduced me to the nickname Xander (but when I told my middle-school pal Alex Harris he had a TV doppelgänger, he was thoroughly unimpressed). These nicknames blew my fucking mind. I cannot think of many other analogous ones, at least that have prominence in the English-speaking world. Liam for William? Coby for Jacob? Nina for Antonina? Tina for Christina? Bert for Albert? Bella for Isabella? Rika for Frederika? Beth for Elizabeth? Diego for Santiago?

What if all those Bens I know went by Jamin instead (or Jammin', just to make the pronunciation clear)? What if every last Sam and Lem were a Muel and a David or two were Vid—or Id? I could be Nah; Jessica Simpson's daughter could be Well; together, we could express ambivalence. 

Phyllis

A parable (fable?—oh, words, terms, nomenclature, I know not how to use you), if you will:

The other day I remarked to myself, Huh! I sure seem to know a lot of Baby -isses. There's that Iris that I met, and that Alice, and that other Alice. This is, I think, a Thing.

So I got to thinking, based on all this evidence I had at my disposal: Whither the baby Phyllises?

Especially, I mean, given that there are almost certainly a large number of baby Felices.

When it came time to write this post, though, I thought I ought to confirm my hunches with a splash of data. Alice—this I knew was a modestly popular name, and one whose popularity was rising. Iris, too. But I looked 'em up anyway. Alice: #127 in 2012, up from #142 last year; Iris: #282 in 2012, up from #303 last year. Phyllis, meanwhile, did not appear in the top 1000 names last year. Hoo boy, I wagered, am I on to something! 

But then—then—I looked up Felice, and was surprised to discover that it, too, did not appear in the top 1000 names last year. In fact, when I dug deeper, I learned something that shook me to my core: there were only nine Felices born in 2012. And there were twelve—twelve—Phyllises.

Moral: Leave anecdotal evidence to the pros (like your friend who swears their aunt once taught a girl named Tampon).

Postscript: Let's put things in perspective. It's really not as if either Iris or Alice is wildly popular. I just happen to know three babies with one of those two names. There were 1,122 Irises born in 2012 (0.06% of all baby girls born that year) and 2,480 Alices (zero-point-thirteen-percent). In other words, give me 10,000 American girls between the ages of six and eighteen months, and maybe nineteen of them will be named either Iris or Alice.

Hydrox

I have, in my lifetime, encountered an inordinate number of black-and-white rabbits and guinea pigs—not, to my knowledge, any cats or dogs, but I could be misremembering—named Oreo.

Just once—just once—I'd like to meet a little bunny Hydrox. Is that really so much to ask?

Onan

Look, I ain't asking for a libel charge, or what-have-you. I just think the name of the generator company Cummins Onan is super-fucking-funny, is all. But, that aside, I don't even want to begin thinking about how they go about generating power.

"Cummins is also committed to providing products that minimize their impact on the environment"—except for all that spilled seed, of course. Whoops!

Quacko

I have long, long, long worried—and sometimes, when things feel especially dire, simply resigned myself to the inevitability—that I am related to George Walker Bush. This isn't as unlikely as one might think: Obama and Cheney are eighth cousins; I am the fruit of the same Mayflower as Sarah Palin; Walker was my great-grandmother's maiden name. But it was the recent piece on Slate about Bush's slave-trading great-great-great-great-great-grandfather that sent my paranoia into overdrive: could I, too,  have Thomas "Beau" Walker somewhere in my family tree? So, in a tizzy, I did some digging. I got as far back as my great-great-great-grandfather, who, I then learned, married my great-great-great-grandmother in Quincy, IL, in 1843.

Which got me thinking. Why would they have been in Quincy, IL, in 1843?

Could they possibly have been Mormons?

If this were so, there is almost certainly deeper genealogical records I could probe. In the meantime, though, I did some rudimentary Google searches—keywords like "mormon" and "walker" and "quincy" and "1843." Nothing turned up, no smoking gun, but there were some nice little detours, in particular, "The Mormon Priesthood Ban and Elder Q. Walker Lewis."

This is what brings me to Quacko.

I quote Connell O'Donovan's research at length and bold those names I find especially striking:

Born Quack Walker Lewis on Friday, August 3, 1798 in Barre, Worcester County, Massachusetts to Peter P. Lewis Sr. and Minor Walker Lewis, he was named after his 45 year old maternal uncle, Quacko Walker (who was also born in August, probably on Saturday the 4th, 1753 — Kwaku is Ghanian for "boy born on Saturday", a common naming device among African tribes of the time).  Walker was the couple's fourth of eleven children.  His older siblings were:

• Samuel Alexander Lewis (1792 -1852); married first Susanna "Sukey" Maldree in 1815 and then Elizabeth Munroe in 1841
• Adam Lewis (1794 -1840s); married ____________
• Sophia Lewis (1796- 1852); married black abolitionist John Levy in 1822

Walker's younger siblings were:

• Rev. Joseph Lewis (1800 - 1852) - clergyman; married Sylvia A. ______ of Rhode Island
• Enoch Lewis (1801 - before 1844);  married Azuba Nichols in 1823
• Rosanna V. Lewis (1802 -1826)
• Dinah S. Lewis (1805 - 1860); married first William F. Bassett in 1827 and then Isaac Davidson in 1842
• Andress Valentine Lewis (1806 - 1898); married first Martha Lew in 1832 and then Urania Silver in 1846
• Peter P. Lewis Jr. (1807 -1845); married Relief Ingalls Lovejoy—the sister of Walker's wife—in 1830
• Simpson Harris Lewis (1814 -1887); married Catherine Jackson in 1833, Susan M. Jackson in 1841, Caroline F. Butler about 1845, and Frances Ellen Brown in 1875 

Little is known about Peter P. Lewis Sr. until his marriage to Minor Walker in Barre, December 5, 1792.  In land records he is called a "yeoman" (gentleman farmer); he was born about 1758 and was from Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massaschusetts.
Minor (or Minah and variants) Walker was born a slave in 1758 on the homestead of her parents' owners, James and Isabel Oliver Caldwell, in Barre (Rutland District), Worcester County, the second child and oldest daughter of slave parents Mingo (also known later as Nimrod Quacko or Quameno) and Dinah. (Minor/Minah is a common African woman's name with various possible meanings; Dinah is a Muslim name; Quameno, from Ghaniankwamin, means "boy born on Wednesday", and Mingo is apparently Bobangi for "defiant one", an apt name as will be shown.) 

 O'Donovan continues:

The naming practices of this family over the decades are really quite interesting. The first generation of Mingo, Dinah and their first two children, Quacko and Minor, maintained their ethnicity with names of African origin, but beginning with Mingo's third child, the names became somewhat campy, even mocking, apparently imposed on them by their masters—especially for the boys Step, Prince, Boston, and Cato Walker. However, around the time of the American Revolution, the family began using bourgeois New England names and naming practices, perhaps being influenced by the first wave of white abolitionists, the Quakers. Over the next one hundred years the vast majority of names of this and allied families, such as Relief Ingalls Lovejoy or William Bradford Peck, could just as easily have come from some Monthly Meeting records of the Society of Friends.  This, ironically, led some Mormon genealogists to believe they were in fact white and had LDS temple ceremonies performed vicariously for many of these people, decades before the ban against this would be lifted.

Now, I am not related to Quacko or Relief or Urania or Andress or Azuba or Cato, though it is true that I am related to people with names like Mehitabel and Guy, Kitty and Bryson, Winifred and Winifred and Winifred, Sarah and Barbara, Max and John.

Step, Quameno, Nimrod, Louisa, Helen, Samuel—all names can become wonderful and strange, rich with possibility, entangled in forgotten and imagined and buried histories, if you just look at them the right way.

Ideya

There are two things beautiful about this name, which I first discovered through the late Russian animator Ideya Garanina. Elegant, even.

The first is its subtle manipulation of Ida, a name I long ago established as a personal favorite.

The second is its playful twist on the observations of Walter Benjamin—"The Russians ... like to give their children 'dehumanized' names." What I find so lovely is that here, instead of heavy machinery, we encounter the realm of thought: manual labor gives way to mental labor.

Doodles

The actor Doodles Weaver was born Winstead Sheffield Glenndenning Dixon Weaver.

I first encountered his name in the credits for The Birds (1963), and later as the narrator of the classic Goofy short Hockey Homicide (1945). A real inspiration, his name was, for who could not wish to be a weaver of doodles, to set on the loom a tossed-off sketch, to interlace the warp and weft of your marginalia?

Doodles Weaver's first credited film role was in 1937, one year after the release of  Frank Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. 1937 is also the year of the publication of the work to which the Oxford English Dictionary attributes the first usage of "doodle"—not in the sense of "a silly or foolish fellow; a noodle," but rather in the sense of "an aimless scrawl made by a person while his mind is more or less otherwise applied." The OED's source is Russell M. Arundel's Everybody's Pixillated: A Book of Doodles ("A 'doodle' is a scribbling or a sketch made while the conscious mind is concerned with matters wholely [sic] unrelated to the scribbling").

I mention Capra's film because it popularized "pixillated," which is best used to describe the batty or nutty—noodles, in other words. And, in fact, it is also the source of the word "doodle," which is what Mr. Deeds deems the above portrait.

The Oxford English Dictionary, then, is ever-so-slightly wrong.

And Doodles Weaver, by the way, appeared in an episode of the television series Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1962-63)—based, I trust it fair to wager, on Capra's 1939 film of the same title (a film I have long thought to be onomastically intriguing, as Jean Arthur's Clarissa Saunders believes her first name to be hopelessly embarrassing).

Emma

Jane Austen, Emma:

"I like your plan," cried Mr. Weston. "Agreed, agreed. I will do my best. I am making a conundrum. How will a conundrum reckon?"
"Low, I am afraid, sir, very low," answered his son;—"but we shall be indulgent—especially to any one who leads the way."
"No, no," said Emma, "it will not reckon low. A conundrum of Mr. Weston's shall clear him and his next neighbour. Come, sir, pray let me hear it."
"I doubt its being very clever myself," said Mr. Weston. "It is too much a matter of fact, but here it is.—What two letters of the alphabet are there, that express perfection?"
"What two letters!—express perfection! I am sure I do not know."
"Ah! you will never guess. You, (to Emma), I am certain, will never guess.—I will tell you.—M. and A.—Em-ma.—Do you understand?"
Understanding and gratification came together. It might be a very indifferent piece of wit, but Emma found a great deal to laugh at and enjoy in it—and so did Frank and Harriet.—It did not seem to touch the rest of the party equally; some looked very stupid about it, and Mr. Knightley gravely said,
"This explains the sort of clever thing that is wanted, and Mr. Weston has done very well for himself; but he must have knocked up every body else. Perfection should not have come quite so soon."

Wellingborough

Herman Melville, Redburn:

As I was standing looking round me, the chief mate approached in a great hurry about something, and seeing me in his way, cried out, "Ashore with you, you young loafer! There's no stealings here; sail away, I tell you, with that shooting-jacket!"
Upon this I retreated, saying that I was going out in the ship as a sailor.
"A sailor!" he cried, "a barber's clerk, you mean; you going out in the ship? what, in that jacket? Hang me, I hope the old man hasn't been shipping any more greenhorns like you—he'll make a shipwreck of it if he has. But this is the way nowadays; to save a few dollars in seamen's wages, they think nothing of shipping a parcel of farmers and clodhoppers and baby-boys. What's your name, Pillgarlic?"
"Redburn," said I.
"A pretty handle to a man, that; scorch you to take hold of it; haven't you got any other?"
"Wellingborough," said I.
"Worse yet. Who had the baptizing of ye? Why didn't they call you Jack, or Jill, or something short and handy. But I'll baptize you over again. D'ye hear, sir, henceforth your name is Buttons. And now do you go, Buttons, and clean out that pig-pen in the long-boat; it has not been cleaned out since last voyage. And bear a hand about it, d'ye hear; there's them pigs there waiting to be put in; come, be off about it, now."

Later, just because:

It is really wonderful how many names there are in the world. There is no counting the names, that surgeons and anatomists give to the various parts of the human body; which, indeed, is something like a ship; its bones being the stiff standing-rigging, and the sinews the small running ropes, that manage all the motions.
I wonder whether mankind could not get along without all these names, which keep increasing every day, and hour, and moment; till at last the very air will be full of them; and even in a great plain, men will be breathing each other's breath, owing to the vast multitude of words they use, that consume all the air, just as lamp-burners do gas. But people seem to have a great love for names; for to know a great many names, seems to look like knowing a good many things; though I should not be surprised, if there were a great many more names than things in the world.