A Rose by Any Other Name
“What’s in a name?” asks Juliet of Romeo. Bugger all, according to both her and Romeo, and just look how it ended for them.
Jean Twenge and Melvin Manis are of a different mind. A couple of well-respected psychologists who, you may think, have been handed a bit of a raw deal in the name department themselves, have devoted a significant portion of their lives to researching how names affect people. And they’ve written a lot of papers and books about it, which might set some guidelines for prospective parents.
Some things you’d think are obvious, like, don’t name your kid after a discredited and now defunct dictator. And yet by 1970, .004% of American newborns were still being branded “Adolph”. And while “Benito” achieved peak popularity in 1929, as recently as 2003 .008% of babies fresh from the womb were doomed to bear the same name as the spectacularly failed Italian dictator. Now .008% may not seem like a lot, but it still amounted to almost two and a half million little Benitos running around having to explain why their parents thought naming them after a self-styled strongman who’d been strung up by his disgruntled citizens was a good idea.
Nevertheless, if you can get away with being a dictator without anyone noticing, the same rules don’t apply. Joseph Stalin, for example, was prone to minor temper tantrums which resulted in the deaths of up to twenty million people. But despite this, Joseph remains a proud name, rising from the doldrums on the moustachioed hero’s death in 1953, and reaching its peak popularity here in New Zealand in the late 1980’s.
But there are other things that can affect how people respond to your name. For example, the name Donald took a big hit globally from the late 1930’s due, not to dictatorship, but in large part due to its association with the duck. Only Scotland bucked the anti-duck trend, understandably so, given its proud association with Donalds, dating back more than twelve hundred years, to Donald of the Picts. However, in the United States, the name began a steady decline in 1934 (the birth year of the duck) but has inexplicably completely tanked in the last few years and is now pretty much off the charts.
Names are a serious business, and Jean and Melvin make the point that unpopular names are associated with increased juvenile delinquency. These poor little mis-named blighters are more likely to deviate from accepted social norms. Worse still, unusual names are connected to higher rates of depression and suicide in teens and adults. However, if a person with an unusual name can come to terms with it, the reverse can be true. They might, for example, develop a more assertive personality spurring them on to become successful in whatever they try to do in life.
With a name like Robin, I do have some skin in the game. It was my father’s idea. As a big fan of Robbie Burns, he took it into his head to name me after the character in the poem Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin. My mother, who was more a fan of the New Zealand Women’s Weekly, thought I was being named in honour of the poet himself, so gave it the thumbs up. But if names are a predictor of life, it didn’t work. While my wife says I’m given to ranting, it would be fair to say that roving hasn’t figured big. But the downside was years at school trying to convince the Name Nazis, the Peters and Johns and Davids, that it was only a girl’s name if it was spelled with a “y”, which had largely been true. And then, bugger me, a whole lot of female Robins start sprouting up, undermining my whole defence. So, I’m now stuck with what is known as a “unisex” name. Like a toilet.
Even having negative initials can be a major life handicap. Let’s say you’re a boy, and your parents had thoughtlessly saddled you with the name Peter Ian Grant. Harmless enough you might think, until someone notices that your initials are P.I.G. Or perhaps you’ve been christened Alice Petunia Evans; a beautiful name, until that most popular girl in the class starts calling you Ape and begins a trend. As a male with unusual initials, your life expectancy will be 2.8 years less than normal. On the other hand, parents who select positive initials (A.C.E. or J.O.Y.) will set their offspring up for an additional 4.48 years of life.
Then, of course, there are those parents who should just have known better but for some reason didn’t. Like the mother who baptised her newborn Chlamydia. She’d never had it, had no idea what it meant, but she’d heard it. “It sounded like a beautiful word,” she said later. Meconium’s Mum had been humming and hawing about names until, while in the delivery room, she overheard the midwife mention the word. Meconium, she thought. Delightful! A melody of a name, not realising that meconium is the thick tarry substance that emerges from a baby’s bum soon after birth. Moronica’s parents were just trying too hard without really thinking it through. Yes, okay, it’s a variant of Monica, and means “advisor”, but the best advice these people could have received would have been to consider another name. And then there are those people who are just plain ornery, like Bill Lear, inventor and designer of the Lear Jet, who thought it would be fun to name his daughter Shanda.
Fashions come and go with names, and there came a time when it was considered chic to name a kid after the place where he or she was conceived. Hence, you might get Back Seat of a Nissan Skyline Smith, or On the Kitchen Table Jones, or Too Out of it to Remember Brown. Ron and Cheryl Howard, seem to have been the catalyst for this trend, thinking it would be good to immortalise their first daughter’s conception in the city of Dallas in her name. Sperm met egg for the next two daughters at the Carlyle Hotel, while son, Reed Cross Howard was named after a road. Whether Reed was conceived on the road (which, and I don’t know if you’ve tried it, but can be a rather dicey business), or while the Howards were negotiating it, and in what sort of vehicle and who was driving at the time, remains unclear. What is clear is that at least one of the Howard children is less than happy about it, with Bryce Dallas once complaining to a film critic that the whole idea was “disgusting”.
What surprises me about this conception business is who keeps track of it? Do they diarise their sexual antics? Do these people have sex so seldom that they can identify the precise location that the conception would have occurred? Or do they just not move around much? As in, “Well, we stayed at the Carlyle for six years, so it’s a pretty safe bet that’s where it happened.”
The best advice you could take from Jean and Melvin would be to stick with the tried and true. Don’t be lured into fads, like naming kids after the diet of the moment, or something obscure on the periodic table, like Promethium. It might seem like a great idea at the time but just remember that the kid has to bear that burden for the rest of his or her life.