Name Game

Name Game

by Marco M. Pardi

All comments are welcome and will receive a reply. All previous posts are open for comment.

I have long been interested in how people devised and carried on their names. I was a couple of months short of six years old when I first encountered “American” names. But then, those encounters seemed to have been the first with a “foreign” name for some of the other kids. Seventy three years later I still encounter people who, on hearing my first name or last name, trot out some play on a historical figure or on a word, then bray like demented donkeys over their presumably original cleverness. Flat affect settles that, though I discovered that only sometime after my youth.

So I listened to names, not with the intent to make fun of them but rather to understand how they originated. Of course, at that time I also took interest in why we use the words we do for anything. Coming to the South years later I learned that some people never seem to get the names of some basic things straight. For example, some fellow students asked me if I had a spare “ink pen”, or I thought they said pen. I finally asked one what other kind of pen there is. She answered, straight pin, safety pin, bobby pin and was thinking of more when I pointed out pen versus pin. It turned out she was far from the only one with this issue and others like it. Another “Southernism” I learned, which is now mainstream as the name of a popular game, was “corn hole”. In the late 1950’s I was talking with a couple of boys from Alabama as they were discussing the difficulty of getting reliable contraceptives. Finally one of them said, Well you can just corn hole. I asked what that meant and was told that people with outhouses for toilets put a bucket of water and corn cobs cleaned of their kernels in the outhouse. After a bowel movement they use a water softened corn cob to clean themselves. The anus is thus known as a (noun) corn hole and anal sex is referred to as (verb) corn hole. This valuable, and disgusting, information had been stored in a deep recess in my mind until recently when I saw advertisements for a game using an inclined board with holes cut in it for contestants to play a game called “corn hole”, throwing a bean bag in hopes of getting it through a hole. Stunned? Yes. Then I thought it was a joke. But it seems to be quite popular. One part of me wants to think that someone behind this game actually knows the origin of the term and is playing on the ignorance of the public. Another part of me insists that common usage has become so crude that no one objects to getting the kids out on the lawn for a rousing game of anus toss.

But returning to names for people, I began to realize many common last names denote or derive from an occupation. Carter, Smith, Baker, Boatwright, Wheeler, and on and on speak to some point in the past when the progenitor of that family line was a practitioner of that trade. I even had a primary school classmate with the last name Pilot. No, I didn’t ask him if his ancestor prosecuted Jesus but I did wonder at what, specifically, was being piloted so long ago. Much later, I had a college student with the actual last name Outhouse. In that case, and several others like it, I wondered how the child bearing that name survived and why they didn’t have their name changed. Long before I met that student I had wondered, given what I had gone through with my name, how some people maintain their name when it is clearly susceptible to cruel misuse. Another student announced in class that she was in the process of having her first name legally changed. She felt that, named Shequitha, she had no likely prospects of even getting an interview for a decent job. She specifically called her name a “ghetto name”. She was probably right about the interviews. But the African-American population in general has names, particularly last names, which go back only a few generations and came from someone else. During the 1960’s leaders like Malcolm X exhorted fellow Black Americans to reject their “slave names” and forge new identities and lineages based on heritage. A problem arose when people did not know how to acquire a name from one of the more than 500 different sub-Saharan cultures and began making up names or borrowing from other cultures such as classical Greeks, Romans and modern day French.

Of course, borrowing names from other cultures can be tricky. A former Secretary-General of the United Nations was a Burmese man known by the singular name Thant. In referring to him one commonly used the Burmese honorific U, somewhat equivalent to Mister. But those unfamiliar with the Burmese language took this to be his first name, thereby often introducing him as Mr. U Thant – or Mister Mister Thant.

Watching what is currently happening in Ukraine, and by extension in the surrounding countries accepting refugees, I am reminded of the aftermath of WWII. As the Soviet armies swept westward across Europe many thousands of people feared being stuck behind what Churchill later called “The Iron Curtain”. They dropped everything including identity papers if they had them and fled west, ahead of the Soviets, hoping to make it into the sector controlled by the Allies. As they did so they were settled into D.P. Camps (Displaced Persons). The Allies and the Soviets reached an agreement that each side would return to the other side those who ethnically and actually belonged there. Multi-lingual intelligence officers circulated among the D.P.s listening to conversations and interviewing those they suspected of being on the wrong side. So, fearing their names would betray their ethnicity many shorted or otherwise altered them. They spoke as little as possible and attempted to speak the languages of the areas they claimed to be from. Western officers, knowing what awaited those they sent to the Soviets, often accepted the obvious ruse. But then, with each such acceptance of a person with an altered name something happened: Fission. That is, a lineage which may have been many generations old suddenly stopped and a new one arose. And, especially when they were resettled in another country they altered their names again to “fit in” among the locals. Or, their names where altered by Immigration officials simply too tired to struggle with the spelling of a name they could not understand. I’ve met several people who confided to me that their current name is such a derivation.

Obviously, there is no such critical need for this fission to occur among the Ukrainians who have fled Ukraine. Some may choose to do so simply out of personal comfort but it is highly unlikely to be forced upon them.

There can be other reasons for name changes. For many years the President of what was then Yugoslavia was known as Tito. His actual name was Josip Broz, but as a communist in hiding from the Nazis he followed standard Party procedure and adopted one pseudonym after another. Tito stuck. There is even a legend about the name, suggesting it is a Croatian term meaning “Do it” and deriving from his habitually decisive commands to his subordinates. Another legendary name was Joseph Stalin, or Iosif Djugashvili. Known throughout the world as Joseph Stalin, Djugashvili is thought to have taken the pseudonym Stalin, meaning steel in the Georgian language, to identify himself with Lenin. Hence, the legend arose that he was “the man of steel”.

It seems that sometimes there is a feeling that behavioral characteristics pass down through families. Names have been changed to avoid association with some well known ancestor. Some of us don’t particularly mind. My mother’s side of the family includes inter-marriage with the Machiavelli family. I’m pretty sure that’s not obvious to people who have met me. Oh. So now it is. Okay.

In the Intelligence Community, case officers assigned to Embassies under the guise of Cultural Attache or Economic Attache or something else but tasked with the recruitment of locals as agents never disclose their true names to agents. They use pseudonyms in case the agent is a “dangle” – an operative for the other side, or the agent is caught and interrogated. So, you’ve got to live much of your life under an assumed identity.

On a more common level I’ve often wondered at how American women feel when they are expected to take the last name of a husband at marriage. I could not imagine such a change for myself, yet we as a society seem to take it for granted. In the 1960’s and 1970’s an increasing amount of women refused to do so, retaining their “maiden” name. Others hyphenated the names as is common in some European countries. But then the phenomenon of on-line banking arose. Many banks and credit unions include “Mother’s Maiden Name” among their required security questions. Wise people do not make such information public.

The fact that women change their last names at marriage makes them hard to track. John Smith is John Smith no matter how many times he marries and divorces. Not so with many women as, even after a divorce she may elect to keep the marital name “for the sake of the children”.

Furthermore, I’ve heard dismay, even anger, within families that do not produce a male heir to “carry on the family name”. I did not do so, nor will I. After the trauma of divorce and loss of custody I determined I would never risk putting another child through that horror and I got a vasectomy. End of the line as far as my contribution to the family lineage. But I care more about children than I do about a name and lineage on a paper.

How about you, Reader?