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

Ingeborg

This is an entry I am already not proud of.

My cat is name Ingeborg, after Victor Sjöström’s Ingeborg Holm (1913), but she probably wouldn’t be named Ingeborg if I weren’t an ugly American. After all, in my rough tongue and to my tin ear, her name is awful funny-sounding. Like cyborg, like Murgatroyd, like Scheherazade—or, if we go the all-Scandinavian route, like Aslög (ass meaning god), like Barbro (Barbara), like Falkor (cf. The NeverEnding Story [1984]), like Gunilla, like Øystein, like Halfdan (“originally a byname for someone who was part Danish”), like Jerk, like Odd, like Roar, like Rut, like Torkel.

Other Ing- names I do not, in my brutish, culturally insensitive way, find as amusing, though they are rather musical, e.g., Ingegard. I do have a story I like to tell about an Ing- name, however, which I might as well tell again now. In the eleventh grade I had a huge Stephen Malkmus poster on my wall and my heart was set a-pounding by the prospect of him going on tour to promote his first solo record. Imagine my delight, then, when news of this contest reached my inbox: 

As you might have read, Stephen’s solo debut was provisionally entitled ‘Swedish Reggae.’ For fear of getting filed in the “reggae” or “world music” section at Tower, a corporate decision was made to force Stephen to call the album something really crazy. Like, ‘Stephen Malkmus.’ Anyhow, if you can name another practicioner of Swedish reggae, you might win yourself a pair of tickets to Stephen’s sold out show at the Bowery Ballroom this Thursday night (1/25). The most creative answers will be unveiled in this space.

The fine print—that winners had to be eighteen—did not deter me. I was a smitten sixteen-year-old. We would work it out, or so I would dream beneath my paper Malkmus. Like Cupid shoots an arrow, then, I sent off my most creative answer: Ingmarley.  

Not a good name for a cat, incidentally, but perhaps suitable for a dog.

Fleur

As is often the case, the New York Times Weddings and Celebrations section is a source of inspiration:

Thirty years ago, Nancy LeSage and Fleur Marks were strangers with something in common. Miss LeSage, of Madison, Conn., and Miss Marks, of Princeton, N.J., saw their photos side by side on a Society News page of The New York Times on Sunday, May 2, 1982.
Miss LeSage, it was announced on Page 77, had become engaged to William Koerner Hellmuth, while Miss Marks, her wedding announcement in the next column, had taken the surname of her husband, William Dodge Rueckert, whom she had married the day before....
Mrs. Hellmuth’s daughter, Grayson, began dating Mrs. Rueckert’s son, Cleveland, in September 2004, while both were students at the University of Vermont...
And now, the two brides have something else in common, as the wedding announcement of their children, Grayson Marshall Hellmuth and Cleveland Dodge Rueckert, appears, at right, in The Times.

Just, like, to recap some of the names in this article: Nancy (f), Fleur (f), William (m), William (m), Grayson (f), Marshall (f), Cleveland (m), Dodge (m).

A question I have: Why is Grayson’s middle name Marshall?

Philbert

I feel I can claim with some degree of confidence that many an onomasticator is intimately familiar with the writings of Lucy Maud Montgomery, in particular those that detail the antics of her plucky heroine Anne Shirley. Lest you have forgotten, I remind you:

"Well, don't cry any more. We're not going to turn you out-of-doors to-night. You'll have to stay here until we investigate this affair. What's your name?"
The child hesitated for a moment.
"Will you please call me Cordelia?" she said eagerly.
"Call you Cordelia? Is that your name?"
"No-o-o, it's not exactly my name, but I would love to be called Cordelia. It's such a perfectly elegant name."
"I don't know what on earth you mean. If Cordelia isn't your name, what is?"
"Anne Shirley," reluctantly faltered forth the owner of that name, "but, oh, please do call me Cordelia. It can't matter much to you what you call me if I'm only going to be here a little while, can it? And Anne is such an unromantic name."
"Unromantic fiddlesticks!" said the unsympathetic Marilla. "Anne is a real good plain sensible name. You've no need to be ashamed of it."
"Oh, I'm not ashamed of it," explained Anne, "only I like Cordelia better. I've always imagined that my name was Cordelia—at least, I always have of late years. When I was young I used to imagine it was Geraldine, but I like Cordelia better now. But if you call me Anne please call me Anne spelled with an E."
"What difference does it make how it's spelled?" asked Marilla with another rusty smile as she picked up the teapot.
"Oh, it makes such a difference. It looks so much nicer. When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can; and A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished. If you'll only call me Anne spelled with an E I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia."

Anne, you will also remember, goes on to fall in love with a boy named Gilbert Blythe, but only after a protracted period of madly disliking him. I recall, but imprecisely, that she at some point muses on his name—that, say, he is indeed not blithe, and nor is he as handsome or as lovable as a Gilbert should be.  

Mind you, that a Gilbert could be handsome, let alone lovable, I once thought wildly funny.

Several years before I first encountered the antics of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s plucky heroine Anne Shirley I watched and rewatched The Muppets Take Manhattan, wherein Jim Henson’s hapless proxy Kermit the Frog, suffering from amnesia, befriends a Bill, a Jill, a Gill, and dubs himself ... Phil.

I should first mention, because it bears mentioning, that I was always troubled by the inclusion of Gill, for who indeed is named that, spelled that way? Gil is one thing, Gill another. But no mind.  After all, I always appreciated, too, that Bill comes from William, Jill from Jill (or, maybe, maybe, Jillian), Gill from Gilbert, and Phil from Philip—that is, that four very different names can nonetheless yield four very similar nicknames.

Unless, of course, Kermit’s Phil was not a Philip but a Philbert, and just as Gilbert yields Gil(l) and Albert yields Al ... well, you know.

And yet, I note, rarely did I mentally link Gilbert to Albert. Gilbert was, for prepubescent me, a wildly unhandsome and unlovable name for its roundness, its bounciness, its goofiness—its gill, as in a fish, and its bert, as in burp, as in that cranky Muppet. No, Albert I linked with Alfred—how many Alfreds, I wonder, go by Al and how many by Fred? If I were one, I would claim that the al meant I was the definite article.

The phil of Philbert, though, means no one, not even Anne Shirley, can accuse it of unromantic fiddlesticks.

Anomie

Not a name.

But I do not see why not.

I mean: Sophie, Marie, Amelie, Elodie, Aimée.

And: Naomi, Noemi, Noemie, Noam, Naum, Naomh.

Not to mention: Annabelle, Analise, Analy, Anaïs, Anatole.

And: Anaphora, Ennui, Aporia, Différance, Dilettante, Angst, Découpage, Agony. 

Scheherazade

I have elsewhere—you will have to trust me on this—professed my profound dislike for most things Slate and all things Dear Prudence, although disliking a certain thing rarely—and again you will have to trust me on this—prevents me from engaging with it. Sometimes I am grateful for my acts of self-flagellation, at least insofar as they yield onomastic insight. To wit, from a recent Dear Prudence column:  

Dear Prudence,
I am a 30-year-old Middle Eastern journalist who has had a girlfriend for several years. Both of us are virgins. Because of the government and our families we can't have intimate sexual relations, but we will marry next year. I love my girlfriend but the problem is I daydream a lot about sex. Half of the sexy daydreams are about my girlfriend and half of them about other women friends, workmates, actresses, and porn stars. I do not dream about being emotionally close to them, only about sex. Is this a betrayal? Could this end my marriage? How can I stop?
—Daydream Problem

Dear Daydream,
So you want to stop your sexual daydreams—I’ve heard death is a very effective cure. Until then, despite what you may have been told about your sexual fantasies, they are perfectly normal. From your brief description, yours are pretty much standard issue. Your thoughts are not a betrayal and they shouldn’t interfere with your marriage. You and your wife may even want to share some of your fantasies as you get to know each other better in bed. (Leave out the ones about how hot your co-worker Scheherazade is.) I don’t know how accessible sexual reading material is in your country, but as you approach the happy day, you might want to do some boning up on what’s coming. Sex Made Easy, by Debbie Herbenick, is one place to start.
—Prudie

At issue here is darling Prude’s parenthetical—for are we not to be amused by the prospect that someone by the ghastly name of “Scheherazade” could be hot? This, after all, is an advice columnist smitten by lousy puns (“boning up on what’s coming,” hyuck!). She is, I hate to say it, attentive, however superficially, to the rhythms of language—i.e., what sounds funny. And “Scheherazade,” that sounds funny: the only thing remotely feminine about it is the “her” in the middle!

The insight thus yielded is that our dear Prudence is not above the occasional racist larff. Tune in next week when she joshes about a well-read LaceDarius and Malice the mathematician. 

Malice

Not too long ago I was appropriately outraged by the facts reported by Ada Calhoun in the New York Times Magazine piece “The Criminalization of Bad Mothers,” an outrage I then felt moved to broadcast on Facebook. The following exchange then ensued:

—Not to detract from the seriousness of the piece, but I know this caption is relevant to your interests: “Heather Capps, 25, and her 5-month-old son, Malice”
—Yeah, what I find interesting is how that name bucks trends—relatively few male names end in that sound and the “a” isn't the incredibly popular long “a” of Aidan, Jacob, and Mason. (I mean, there is Elias and Jonas and Jarvis and Ellis, etc. But they have nothing on the popularity of names ending in “n” and “ah.”) (And lest you think I am missing that, like, his name is Malice, trust me, I noticed.)
—Right, “Malice” sounds like “Alice,” which is super feminine! what if we all started naming our boy babies super femme names like “Clarice” and “Denise” and “Avarice”! 
—“Phallice”

Look, I do not pretend to be above the frequent cryptoracist and/or cryptoclassist shit and/or giggle. But let us just take a moment to admire Heather Capps, who indeed gave her son a remarkable name.
According to Social Security Administration data, there were no more than four babies name Malice in 2011. So while it might not be to my taste, but, Jesus, very little is—and, moreover, it is interesting, which is more than you can say about, say, my name or, probably, your name. 

Nicodemus

Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend:

“Do you like the name of Nicodemus? Think it over. Nick, or Noddy.”
“It is not, sir,” Mr. Wegg rejoined, as he sat down on his stool, with an air of gentle resignation, combined with melancholy candor; “it is not a name as I could wish any one that I had a respect for, to call ME by; but there may be persons that would not view it with the same objections.—I don't know why,” Mr Wegg added, anticipating another question.
“Noddy Boffin,” said that gentleman. “Noddy. That's my name. Noddy—or Nick—Boffin. What's your name?”