What’s in a Name?

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Last Saturday, I met the first Doug I’ve known since high school. It’s not a very common name, and when I lived in Austria, the Austrians pronounced it “Duck”, much to my chagrin. My family, however, by and large uses normal names compared to most families, and while I hold nothing against those with uncommon names, I think the desire to be different, when it comes to naming of children, does our posterity a great disservice.

Growing up, my name, benign though it sounds, attracted all sorts of mockery. The Nickelodeon cartoon series of same name became the source of the jokes, but since I had never seen it, it bothered me only that my compatriots chose to mock me. When you give your child a name that’s easily mocked or difficult to use, it sets him up as a target for the vitriol of mean-spirited persons whose fragile egos depend on their ability to look less foolish than the next person, they having no accomplishments with which to prop up their curriculum vitae.

This week, I’ve read two articles excoriating this practice. In the first, a blogger I respect wrote about newborn babies in a nearby hospital:

Orangejello (Or-an-juh-lo) and Lemonjello (Le-man-juh-lo)

And joked about another:

Analtouch (uh-null-toosh)

Today I saw about how a court in New Zealand forced a name change for a poor baby named Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. In the ruling, the judge wisely proscribed:

"The court is profoundly concerned about the very poor judgment which this child's parents have shown in choosing this name," he wrote. "It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap, unnecessarily."

My sister attended school with a girl named "Shithead (shi-tay-ed)" and a friend from college married a girl named Kris Miss Day. Sometimes the name is happenstance, like my grandmother’s high school sweetheart who was named Harry Pitts. When it’s purposed, that’s irresponsible and sets up children for psychological damage and insult. Furthermore, you run other risks. In college, a classmate of mine from Uganda named “Justice” admitted that his parents fled the nation as political refugees, his name having attracted government attention to their political dissidence. Names put people in predicaments.

It seems that everywhere I go, everyone wants to be different. Almost every girl I meet now sports an uncommon nome de plume, born of some strange tradition in their family to either use alphabet letters, famous persons, seasons, colors, cultural references, etc., with which the world around them are not familiar and which serve as a tool for the butchery of their good name, i.e. their character. We need no longer judge men on the color of their skin when their name will do.

I already mentioned working with a coworker of a darker complexion who shared this sentiment. Cameron could not understand why he had to be an African-American and not straightforwardly an American. Denominations like African-Americans, Iraqi-Americans, Italian-Americans and the like separate people who should be drawn together. The enemy knows that in order to beat us, it must first drive us apart, and this is just another guise planted in our mind by liberals by which to divide Americans along demographics (those with unique names and those with fuddy-duddy ones). The first tool of an abuser is to isolate the victim.

We are Americans. I really love the scene in the first Spiderman movie where the man yells down from the bridge, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.” This enjoinder to unite or die is a theme of the Revolution- our Founding Fathers knew that only with a united front can the armies of darkness be driven from the bastion of freedom that is the United States. Instead of celebrating what sets us apart, we should be celebrating what draws us together.