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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
