Marsa Joyoy

A member of one of my facebook groups recently posted a meme thing that has been going the rounds in her circles, saying that you have recently given birth to a daughter and her name must be the first three letters of your mother's name plus the last two letters of your own name.

So, announcement: I am now the mother of a baby girl named Marsa.

Marsa fit in pretty well with the names the other ladies in the group got. But then I tried out the same formula with my sisters' names. And what did they get? Maria. Marte. Maryn.

Every single one of those is a real, reasonably normal name. Unfair!

I was able to console myself with the results I got when I gender-flipped it and used my dad's and brothers' names: Ranam and Ranll. At least Marsa has a decent vowel/consonant distribution.

After that, I played around a bit with other family names. When I was born, I guess I really should have been named Loule or Dorle. And Dad was supposed to have been Othnd. (The men in my family aren't doing too well with name pronouncability, are they?)

My favorite is probably what came up when I moved on to middle names: Joyoy.

Maybe I will name my daughter using this method. After all, who would want to be called Martha Joy or Margaret Joy or Miriam Joy if they could be known as Marsa Joyoy?

Heavenly Nicknames

Potenial spoiler alert: I briefly discuss something major that happens at the end of the season one finale of Once Upon a Time.

A Literary Name Nerd

I was reading Winter's Child by Cameron Dokey and found this passage:

Though my father and I never discussed names again, that afternoon marked the beginning of my fascination with them. I began to make a study of names, collecting them much like other children collected coins or stamps or dolls.

It wasn't simply the sound of a name that appealed to me, though I did enjoy this: the way a name felt inside your mouth as you formed its syllables, the space it occupied in the air when you pronounced it. But there was also the way a name and the person who bore it got along together. For this, or so it always seemed to me, was the heart of what a name is all about.

It really tickled me to find this. It's the first time I ever saw name love come up in a novel.

Any Other Name

When Kate Bjorkman starts actually dating her brother's friend in the book The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (Sorry for the spoiler, but seriously, it's a romance. You know they're going to get together.), she starts calling him Richard instead of Rich.

In The Luckiest Girl by Beverley Cleary, Shelley won't call Philip "Phil" because the nickname doesn't feel special enough for him.

I don't get that.

Whatever my feelings about them, I tend to think of boys by whatever everybody else calls them. If he generally goes by Ricky, I think of him as Ricky. If he goes by Richard, that's what I call him. The only time I didn't, it was because his nickname was very unusual, which made it seem like a pet name. And I did not feel close enough to him to use it. I did eventually get over that. But it was a real issue, because a pet name is special. Short form nicknames are often just "their name" - if you ask a guy his name and he answers Dave, there's a pretty good chance his birth certificate says David. But nobody is likely to answer the "what is your name" question with the pet name their mother calls them unless they're about a year old.

You hear of lovers calling each other pet names like honey, bunny pie, sweetums, and so forth. Other names actually come from real attributes and specific conversations between the people involved. I understand those. In fact, I actually use some. But I don't understand when or how you go from calling somebody "Jack" or "Alice" to calling them "Darling". And I am apparently not the only person who finds the transition odd. When Zack and Kelly get engaged in Saved By the Bell: College Years, Zack decides the time has come for them to use the traditional appellations, and he and Kelly have the following conversation:

Zack: Well, good morning, honey.
Kelly: Honey?
Zack: Sure. I mean, what do almost married people call each other? I know, I know, why don't you call me what your mom calls your dad?
Kelly: Okay, I'll call you Frank.

Maybe I could someday end up calling some guy weird petnames Or be called them by him. I don't see it now, but I probably shouldn't say impossible. Still, when I think of it... well, I was watching Oklahoma! with my family one day this winter, and when Ado Annie sang about "Sposing that he says that you're sweeter than cream, and he's gotta have cream or die?" I said I'd probably laugh at him. It's not that I don't like romance - I do. I just don't think that is romantic. Romance should be sincere and personal. And a lot of those over-the-top compliments usually seem insincere, unoriginal, and impersonal. I want compliments that apply specifically to me and could not be used on just any old girl who catches your fancy. And even more than that, I want them to actually mean something.

Spam Names

I've read people on message boards talking about the weird names used for the people who their spam is supposedly from, but I never really paid attention to mine until today.

Most of my spam does not have a person's name in the from field- I get a lot of companies and descriptions, maybe some web addresses. But in what I did get, I noticed an odd pattern. Almost half of them have girl names for last names. These names: Connie, Rona, Nell, Lauralee, Albertha, Paula, Celeste, Theda, Carole, Kathryn, Tiffani, Liza, Catarina, Carolann, and Ciera.

There were also a couple humorous name combinations: Virginia Mann and Irish Catarina.

Although I suppose Irish Catarina could be some sort of company name. Or Virginia Mann, for that matter, but I'd expect it to be Virginia Man then.

Loosely Linked Thoughts on Names and Identity

If you want to know absolutely nothing about what happens to Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables before reading it in the novels and have not made it though the third volume then do not read this post.