While Melville was getting better physically and looking around for a new literary inspiration, he attended what the Berkshire County Eagle called "a startling novelty in this region"—a "fancy dress picnic" at which Lizzie carried off the honors in the character of "Cypherina Donothing" dressed in a costume of cyphers.
"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."
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.)
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?
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.
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!
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.
