Second outing: The name game or naming gaming

This post first appeared in August 2007 and generated much discussion. Still does. I thought it will make some interesting light reading and tickle this blog’s readers’ grey cells as well as funny bones.

What a wonderful thing a name is! We are stuck with it, more or less, for life, and yet we rarely have any control over its choice.

We cannot choose our parents so we are sort of given the family name or second name, and of course the first name can hardly be chosen by us when we are barely out of our shrink-wrap. In India, the baby is not named immediately upon birth or before checking out of the hospital, but on a special ‘auspicious’ day picked by the family pandit, who also advises people on the letters they can and cannot use for names. But since all this happens within weeks of the birth, it is hardly any consolation.

There are exceptions of course. Penelope Trunk, the blogger and writer, was apparently born Adrienne. Another Indian friend was so fed up with her siblings pulling her leg that in high school, she went and changed her name to something wholly unrelated to her original name. Yet another friend in the UK only goes by a shortened version of her old-fashioned yet charming English name and a surname, which she shares with her son though she has been married and divorced once more after divorcing her son’s father. Another woman in my college in Cambridge took on an altogether different and a rather lovely name with celestial links, but none to her family or given name.

And then there are the interesting practices, such as taking on a new name to make it easy for others to say it. I think one’s name being mispronounced is one of the worst things to experience, right up there with nails screeching down a blackboard.

I have recently gained two new e-contacts, both originally from mainland China. One is a reader and the other a ‘friend’ on one of the more obscure social networking sites that I use, although she too has been reading this blog through somebody’s link-love. It may be time to confess that before this, my only close personal contact with people from China has been with only a few girls, the three with whom I shared my kitchen in Cambridge for a year, of whom one was also my flatmate; my very good lawyer friend in America; and one of my classmates in Cambridge, who was the exception to the ‘rule’ below. I knew some in MIT too but they did not appear to use their Chinese names at all.

What was fascinating about all of them was their anglicised names - Amy, Jenny, Wendy, Jane, Teresa, Kate - when their email handles and their formal, full names were lovely Chinese names meaning ‘the sunrise’, ‘little scholar’, ‘the flower’ and so on. My once-removed Chinese contacts have a similar thing going with anglicised first names and Chinese middle-names and family names.

Then there is the cultural practice of using a different name, a very different one from one’s given name. Why, for instance, do Americans call a person called John ‘Jack’? Or why do Bengalis give their children complicated tongue-twister bhaalo-naam (lit. good name), such as Dwaipayan or Aniruddho, only to call them by their completely randomly chosen daak-naam (pet name) such as Gogol or Bubai? And then there are regional and temporal quirks in pet names. An older English person named Richard may be Dick, but nowadays, we best call him Rich. Alexander is Alex in England but Sandy in Scotland. Go figure!

Sometimes one does not choose but gets given a pet name of sorts. See Basab’s post here on his not-so-secret Starbucks name.

Then there is the eternal search for a unique name. Vidya Pradhan has written today about the race for unusual names, preferably one with a unique domain address still available. A few years ago, a pregnant friend of mine was searching for a name for their yet-to-be-born son. In their search, they stumbled upon a lovely name. Alas, it has also conferred upon the child a rather unfortunate set of initials (A R S) which he may never be able to live down completely.

Popular names are the zeitgeist of a nation or a society too. In the UK, biblical names such as David are being relegated to the back-seat in favour of more exotic yet scriptural names like Joshua, while girls are being called Paige and Madison rather than Victoria and Katherine.

In a class-riven society, names could signal a lot more than we think. I do not wish to upset some people I know, so I’d better leave this without examples

Then there are names which travel across cultures and those that do not. John could be Johannes or Juan. Joanna could become Ioanna in Greece. James is Hamish north of the border in the UK. Alice is Alicia in Spain, while Andrew is Andres and Herman is Armando.

And then there are the tongue-twisting Indian names that their western colleagues somehow learn to pronounce and in most cases, pronounce more properly than they may be said in India. They may be difficult to say but nearly always an Indian name has a meaning, rooted in religion, nature, culture, desirable virtues, our vast mythology and our portfolio of ‘Gods’. Too many examples to think of something specific but hey, mine is the name of a small, white flower with an orange stem, which falls off when it is ready - small, perfectly formed, fragrant and deceptively wilful!

Given a full Indian name, and with some general knowledge about India, you can guess almost the entire pedigree of a person: the region he comes from, the state (most of the times), the religion (almost always), the caste. That ‘analysis’ complete and the person firmly ensconced in a slot in the grid of our given social framework, we then proceed to find more about his education, his family, his prospects and finally, we may, if he is lucky, come around to discussing his views and thoughts and ideas. I have a college friend, who gave up her second name altogether to escape such easy ‘classification’. Now of course, she uses her husband’s name as her second name and is back in the surreal realm where people classify and slot you even before they know any more than your name.

A name could be a blessing. Hear the name Alannah Myles and it is easy to imagine an artiste, what with its lilting ‘l’ and musical ‘m’ sounds. A name could also be a curse, as names are sometimes used to discriminate when we apply for jobs, as some studies have shown.

An invented - and inventive - name could be your entire career. Don’t you think Freddie Mercury was a clever clog for swapping his family name Bulsara over for Mercury? Or how boring it might have been for The Police’s front-man to continue calling himself ‘Gordon Sumner’ instead of renaming himself ‘Sting’?

So, why do we have so little control over our names?