I mentioned before that I am interested in names. Make that fascinated by. I've pored over name dictionaries for as long as I can remember. I frequently visit several baby name blogs and message boards. And every year, I wait anxiously for the Social Security Administration to release the statistics on the names of the new babies born the previous year, so I can look at trends and see what names are gaining and losing popularity and how the trends differ by state and what the most popular combinations are for twins.
Those should be released any day now, by the way.
Well, a couple days ago, I checked a book out of the library called The Language of Names: What We Call Ourselves and Why It Matters by Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays. The first two sentences on the front flap of the dust jacket are,"Why are we so often annoyed when somebody gets our name wrong? Because our sense of self is involved, and our names touch on every aspect of our lives." Well, that got me thinking. Because I don't get annoyed when somebody gets my name wrong. Most of the time I don't even notice. So does that mean that I have no sense of self?
Maybe that's why I have such a hard time thinking of something interesting about myself when we go around introducing ourselves in a group setting.
Anyway, I know it matters to other people. My friends are frequently bothered when somebody mispronounces my name. And Anne of Green Gables definitely cared when her name was misspelled. In the third book of the series, Anne of Avonlea, the name theme showed up in a different context. At the end of Anne's first day as a schoolteacher, the mother of two new pupils comes to talk to Anne about a couple of name-related matters:
"Clarice Almira told me that you pronounced our name Donnell. Now, Miss Shirley, the correct pronunciation of our last name is Donnell... accent on the last syllable. I hope you'll remember this in future."
"I'll try to," gasped Anne, choking back a wild desire to laugh. "I know by experience that it's very unpleasant to have one's name spelled wrong and I suppose that it must be even worse to have it pronounced wrong."
"Certainly it is. And Clarice Almira also informed me that you call my son Jacob."
"He told me his name was Jacob," protested Anne.
"I might have expected that," said Mrs. H. B. Donnell... "When he was born I wanted to call him St. Clair... But his father insisted he should be called Jacob after his uncle. I yielded, because Uncle Jacob was a rich old bachelor... When our innocent boy was five years old Uncle Jacob actually went and got married and now he has three boys of his own... The moment the invitation to the wedding... came to the house I said, 'No more Jacobs for me, thank you.' From that day I called my son St. Clair and St. Clair I am determined he shall be called. His father obstinately continues to call him Jacob, and the boy himself has a perfectly unaccountable preference for the vulgar name. But St. Clair he is and St. Clair he shall remain."
It is pretty hard to see how Mrs. Donnell thinks Jake's preference for his original name is unaccountable. That is the name he learned to identify with from his earliest days. I would have dismissed it as just an odd book character quirk if I hadn't read about a similar event in the preface to The Language of Names.
Justin Kaplan's mother died when he was seven years old. At that time, Justin's father stopped calling him by his birth certificate name, Justin, which he had just tolerated. Instead, he started using his original favorite: Joseph. Later in life, Kaplan saw Justin and Joseph as two distinct entities. And he chose to be known as Justin, the better adjusted of the two. Which makes a certain amount of sense, considering the Joseph persona came about when he was grieving and adjusting to life without his mother. But to this day, or, rather, to the time of the writing of the preface, he gets angry whenever someone introduces him as Joseph or Joe.
On a side note, when I first read Anne of Avonlea, I thought the name St. Clair was extremely out there and ridiculous. But recently, I discovered that there is some tradition behind giving a Saint name as a first name through a couple Appellation Mountain name of the day posts: St. John Sinclair
But it still isn't a name I would ever choose.
And in case you were curious, we learn in a later Anne book that Jake wins out in the end and is called by his preferred name.
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