Today We Have Naming of Names....
Isn’t it strange the way children’s first names go in and out of fashion? And I am forever interested in whether that is reflected by authors in their characters in books – the children grow up of course, so this applies to adult characters too. I have a LOT to say on this possibly rather niche subject, so much that I have to divide this into two posts. Today I will look at books set or written in living memory – where a reader can think ‘no-one had that name at my primary school’, which is of course research at its finest and most unarguable. In a later post I will look at historical fiction, the names of yesteryear, and the rather teasing Tiffany Problem. [The second post is here]
But for now – the
more recent past.
Looking through a 1950s cookbook, I found this recipe and
picture for cakes for a children’s party – called party cupcakes then (although
people claim this name came in recently, and insist they were always fairy
cakes, that is not the case, as my own memory tells me.) I thought the names
they chose for the cakes were very typical of the time, and it’s an easy to way
to compare the list with a modern party picture:
When I’m reading a modern book set in the recent past – say, 30-70
years ago – I can get very critical about the first names given to characters.
I have discussed this with some author friends, and I know that some of my most
respected writers are very very careful about this – So I asked them for their thoughts.
First, Sarah Ward, whose crime novels have featured frequently
on the blog – you can find a selection
here – and who has written books with dual time schemes, and one set wholly
in the past.
I love naming my characters and I find a name either fits or it doesn't. For first names, I guess the character's approximate age and then look up the most common names for that birth year whether it be the 1940s for The Shrouded Path or 2003 for The Birthday Girl. For last names I either raid my family tree (much to the amusement of my aunt) or I look at names specific to the region I'm setting my book - so common Welsh surnames such as Evans or less common such as Alban. You can find on the internet the top 50 last names by county. I've got a new series coming out in October set in New England so I had to apply my usual methods and it worked fine…
Lissa Evans has written her
marvellous series of books set in the 1920s and 1940s – Old
Baggage, Crooked
Heart and V
for Victory, plus Their
Finest Hour and a Half about 1940s film-making (all on the blog). She said this:
I agree with you about characters' names - they're hugely important. A name from the wrong generation strikes a note like a cracked bell. I use a lot of my own relatives' names, which I can place precisely in time (my Mum knew three sisters a little older than her, so born around the time of WW1 - called Myrtle, Olive and Daphne, and she was also at school with a girl called Beryl) - I also use newspaper reports from the era, and also occasionally look up the 'most popular boys/girls names' of the year in which my characters would have been born.
Both of them thoughtful and convincing!
I can say that I clearly remember the kind of names people
had when I was growing up in the North of England, and I have lists of my children’s classmates in a
Seattle elementary school in the 1990s (and fascinating reading that makes,
I can tell you – many children called Arielle & Mackenzie & Taylor,
which I think would not have been the case in their English school)
Modern authors could look at books
of the time for guidance ie they genuinely show the names current at the time
of writing. This is what I wrote about a very obscure 1957 book by Barbara
Worsley-Gough, Lantern Hill:
Just look at the collection of first names people had – SO MUCH of their time. Here are some of them: Desmond, Phyllis, Wally, Enid, Basil, Arthur, Doreen, Madge, Edna, Minnie, Brian. Nailing the action totally to the 1950s. Meanwhile, the very arty couple have three children called Tanis, Glaucon and Yseult. A treasure trove of names.
Equally obscure is Crowns
by Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock, from 1947 – these are the
children at the party:
Daphne
Judith Tony Peter Brian Jane Peggy Sonia Andrew Rodney Caryl Anne Michael David
Margery Ben Janet Sebastian and George.
In Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, he lists all the
children in Dolores’s class: and Nabokov said it took him a long time to invent
the names: there may be much to disapprove of in the book, but that sounds very
proper to me.
Then there’s James Bond World – in On
her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) we get this for the potential Bond
girls at the ski resort:
Names like Ruby, Violet, Pearl, Anne, Elizabeth, Beryl, sounded in his ears.
I know that many of my readers will have strong opinions on
character naming – please share in the comments the authors that get it right,
and the names that evoke an era… or even how you felt about your own name.
Children’s party picture from the NYPL collection.
My mother looked down on any name starting with a J sound: Josephine, Jane, Jean, Jill, June. She also looked down on names ending in "een": Doreen, Maureen, Noreen. She chose our names from the family tree! And her mother-in-law asked her why she was giving her daughters servants' names!
ReplyDeleteFor my books I asked friends: who would be on an archaeological dig in the 70s? Living in a "community house" in the 80s? A lot of comrades called Maz, Jez, Caz, Jof, Anni, Loosi, Lindzi. And I'm sure capital letters were "patriarchal".
I knew you'd have great input! have you ever done a blogpost on this topic?
DeleteLove (as ever) your mother's decided views.
Do you remember people whose names ending with 'i' putting litle hearts instead of the dot?
My mother is called Sarah, born in the 1920s, and says no-one else was called Sarah then, it was very old-fashioned - so that changed a lot. So many of them when I was at university.
Sarah, Susan, Pauline, Josephine - where have they all gone? Disappeared with Gordon, Norman, Algernon, Reginald. You know who studies these trends? Mediums. ("I'm getting an Edith and a Violet...")
DeleteYes, very good point about the mediums.
DeleteI once listened in to my son (born 1993) chatting with his friends about 'dealing with relations', the old chestnuts about (generic) aunties wanting to kiss you etc. They were saying 'oh yeah, auntie Mabel, Cousin Edith etc' but absolutely those boys did NOT have anyone with those names in the generation above them - this idea had come from - what? cartoons? old books? I was intrigued.
A relation who is in the business told me 'priests/pastors have books of funny stories to insert into their homilies, but they fail to update the names. No-one is called Johnny or Tommy anymore, but the stories all start 'little Johnny was talking to his mother about sin...' '
A good point I thought.
Really interesting blog! Agree it would jar to have a modern name in a book set in the past, but I do like authors to pick vaguely timeless names. While ‘Beryl’ may be entirely appropriate for the time, I would have a hard time not thinking of a little old lady rather than a teenager!
ReplyDeleteYes indeed, there are names that you can't imagine a baby or an old lady having. Now I think of it, that doesn't apply to boys' names so much does it?
DeleteCuthbert, maybe? Algernon? I'd have said Wilfred too, a few years ago, but that seems to be having a revival. But a common way round this with boys seems to be to use diminutives - Alfie and Bertie and Archie, not Alfred and Albert and Archibald.
DeleteYes all very true. Arthur too - those A names!
DeleteNo-one was called Henry round where I lived growing up - it felt like an old-fashioned name from books and kings. But that was definitely a class thing, and when I went to university I met plenty of privately-educated Henrys of my age!
George too - I'd never met one under 50 until university - where I also encountered my first (and so far, only) contemporary Kitty. The diminutive thing for boys may not be so recent though - it occurred to me that Rex Stout's Archie Goodwin makes it very clear on at least one occasion that his proper legal name is Archie, not Archibald.
DeleteI'd always assumed Archie was a diminutive in that case, good to know the facts!
DeleteThere are some male names that I think of as classless and timeless: Michael, Andrew, Charles.
What a brilliant topic, Moira! Names really are a reflective of the times, and they can tell the reader a lot about the time and place and culture of a book. Of course, some names seem timeless, but a lot of them don't. I need to think about that. As ever, you inspre me.
ReplyDeleteOh Margot I think this is a perfect topic for you - with your memory and wide range of reading I'm going to expect you to come up with some great name/book combos. Look forward to the post!
DeleteI was just re-reading Persuasion (1818), and in chapter 18 admiral Croft complains about the christian names of Louisa and Henrietta Musgrove, which he can never remember. If only girls were called something sensible like Sophy, like his own dear wife.
ReplyDeleteBut strange names do always occur. I've never been able to understand how two 18th-century sisters could have been given such disparate names as Cassandra and Jane. Cassandra was named after her mother, of course, but that only pushes the bafflement back a generation. Why name your daughter after such a tragic mythological figure? - Clare
Now that's a very good point about Cassandra and Jane. And you think if you heard of two sisters with those names, you'd definitely think Cassandra was going to be the hugely successful author whose name would live forever.
DeleteA lot of the names that had been classic from the Middle Ages on were finally reaching the end of their era when I was at secondary school (mid to late 1970s). Only Elizabeth and Catherine were really holding their own. No Mary or Jane in my form; we had a Dorothy and a Margaret and an Anne but their names were considered old-fashioned. Also Iris - probably rather glamorous in the 1940s, not so for a teenager 30 years later.
ReplyDeleteAnne was very popular in my day - now you'll find Anna lot but not Anne, why is that?
DeleteSimilarly, Susan not usual, but versions of Suzannah all over.
And what about Anela? Every class I was in had at least one, but you don't hear it now...
Maybe Anne is considered too short and plain (like Jane - though several girls in my form had Anne or Jane as a middle name). Most popular names as far as I remember were Elizabeth (three - one was to be addressed as such, the others were Libby and Liz), Judith (three again - none of whom would consent to be Judy), Sarah and Clare. We had a Tracey but no Sharon. And yes, Suzanne but not Susan. I don't think I've ever come across Anela though.
DeleteOne name that jarred slightly to me in Robert Irwin's Wonders Will Never Cease: Anthony Woodville calls his wife Elizabeth Beth, which I've always thought of as a later diminutive. I'd have expected Bess in the late 15th century.
Incidentally the 1950s cup cakes look familiar - are they from Good Housekeeping's Cookery Compendium?
DeleteThey are - I am so impressed that you knew that! It was my mother's goto book, and I LOVED looking through it when I was a child, I read it like a novel, taking in the instructions on how to decorate your own wedding cake (!!!). I remembered it and bought my own copy online (I love that modern life makes that kind of thing easy) and so enjoyed looking through it again - as well as its setting me off into thinking about names!
DeleteI mistyped - it should have read Angela!
DeleteI remember writing something and using the name Lily, because I wanted a name that was very old-fashioned and a bit odd. I have watched it become very mainstream again since then.
Wonders will Never Cease will feature when I do a post on names in historicl fiction - though I hadn''t noticed that about Beth. One of my all-time favourite books.
It's the cookery book of my childhood too - now in a box under my bed as Mum had to let it go when downsizing. I suspect anyone who wants an old-school wedding cake like that these days probably has to decorate it themselves - the modern wedding cake seems to be all sponge and impressionistic buttercream.
DeleteI should have worked out Angela - none in my form but I remember more than one higher up the school - late 1950s babies rather than early 1960s. And all the late Victorian flower names are back, with reinforcements - Honeysuckle, Bluebell, Daffodil ...
Yes, wedding cakes have changed very dramatically, haven't they? Even cheese ones...
DeleteAny child called Daffodil is going to be nicknamed Daffy!
Poppy is always nice, and Holly. You'd think all flower names would be equal but they are not. Ivy goes in and out of favour I think.
The flower names seem to come in phases - late Victorian Rose, Lily, Daisy, Violet, then as those faded Daphne, Olive and Myrtle took over. Then another later phase of trees and shrubs - one of my 1970s classmate, Heather, had three younger sisters: Hazel, Rowan and Holly.
DeleteYes the grouping holds doesn't it? - the pretty petalled flowers, and then the shrubs and ground cover! And why do some flowers/plants never make it as names? I was just thinking of the Sargent painting Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose - I assumed they were the names of the girls in the picture (in some grouping) but I just looked it up and they are not. It's a line from a song.
DeleteAnyway, no-one is called Carnation, or Chrysanthemum, or Rhodedondron...
Lily Rose Ruggles from The Family At One End Street is named after that painting.
DeleteExactly! That's where I first came across the idea of the painting, but of course in those days you couldn't easily look it up and see the picture. I was delighted later to see it in a book, and even more delighted to see it in real life eventually - it had made a big impression on me.
DeleteVery late to the party, but on tree names, Molly Clavering's Near Neighbours (1956) has sisters named Willow, Hazel, Rowan, and Holly. It also has some good clothes!
DeleteI am never sure which Molly Clavering books I have read, but not that one I think so I will look it up.
DeleteAnd now I am remembering the children in Hilary McKay's Casson family books, who have colour names - Cadmium, Indigo, Rose - and the significance that Saffy is Saffron.
I volunteer at a couple of local schools and with one exception (bless you, Anthony), not one of the children in my groups is called by anything that would have been recognizably a name thirty years ago.
ReplyDeleteI want to ask these parents what is going to happen when Ladokah and Maximus graduate from school and start sending out job applications.
Maybe the idea is that the name is unplaceable? But yes - when I volunteered in my children's schools I found the names therein endlessly intriguing.
DeleteAlso many names that sounded like they might have been the mother's maiden name - and could equally be a boy or a girl.
I fear that the employers reading the job applications will have kids called Maximus and Ladokah, and it will be poor Anthony who's got the weird name!
DeleteYou may have a point!
DeleteSome years ago I joined a theatre workshop for people over 50. We did various icebreaker’ games which involved our names. The group was largely female. Well over half of the group had a name beginning with J ( including me) . When I was at school the most prevalent female name was some variant of Susan.
ReplyDeleteI write short sketches and plays. The names I use are normally those if family and friends but I try to ensure they are appropriate for the age and background of the character.
YES! I can remember thinking that, why was J so very much the common initial in my day?
DeleteJane, Jan, Janice, June, Janette.
It's also true that some names are expected to become popular but aren't - two of the most famous women of the past 50 years have been Princess Diana and Madonna. I think we all thought there would be lots of girls given those names, but that's not my impression.
Queen Victoria too - she must have been the most famous woman in the world for decades but doesn't seem to have had nearly as many namesakes in her lifetime as one would expect. Though if light literature is anything to go by parents were using the name in the early-mid 1920s (eg the Provincial Lady's little girl and my favourite Georgette Heyer character, Vicky Fanshawe from No Wind of Blame).
DeleteYes good point. Albert was a popular name though wasn't it? - even though he wasn't that popula as a man.
DeleteI must find a list of Queen Victoria's children - she had 9, and each would have had surely at least three names, so it would be a pretty good name indicator.
Names are one of my favorite topics but I never thought of names in books. My mother (b 1910) had friends named Edna and Ethel. Girls in my classes (50s/60s)Sue, Patty, Debby, Barb. I was usually the only Jane. My grandmothers were Maud and Ida.
ReplyDeleteOh great names, very much of their time.
DeleteMy daughter is Barbara, and she has always been the only person of her age with that name!
Patty and versions of Patricia don't come up much now do they?
I would say Emma suddenly came up - quite usual now, but not many people with that name when I was at school.
And then there are the Patricia Wentworth names! Also the "hippie" names from the 1960's, which could be really outrageous.
ReplyDeletePatricia Wentworth is a case on her own - she needs a whole post for her names! But she occasionally has interesting moments, as in one book where Miss Silver has never come across the name 'Janice', which was quite common in my day. I am assembling my list of PW names...
DeleteWiki says Janice was first used in an 1899 book "Janice Meredith" made into a play in the 1920's. So probably not common in Maudie's youth, and maybe not common with the kind of folks who had governesses?
DeleteOh thank you, useful information! I wonder what made it more popular 50-60 years later, which I when I think it must have come in?
DeleteWith hippie names, I read that Zowie Bowie is now [Conventional] Jones. I wonder what became of the Zappa offspring.
DeleteDuncan Jones and a successful film director.
DeleteYes, Zappa got his publicity share with those decisions, and gave columnists the chance to pontificate on names. But it's not difficult to move away from a name you don't like, and plenty of people manage it.
Cher had a child called Chastity, now Chaz and with a number of bumps along the road I believe.
Miss Silver also considers Jason a name odd enough to be worthy of comment.
DeleteIn something I read recently - might have been Wentworth, but I cannot pin it down - someone said Frank was not a name you saw much, which surprised me. I'd have said that was one of the timeless ones.
DeleteIt certainly feels like a name that would still be common in the 1950s, though maybe starting to fall out of favour. Certainly still in use in the Miss Silver books - well-connected and impeccably dressed young policeman Frank Abbott is forever cropping up!
DeleteSovay
Yes indeed, that's why I can't decide if it was in a Wentworth book or not!
DeleteMeanwhile, in Dorothy Sayers' "Strong Poison" (1930), Lord Peter is coaxing his manservant Bunter to insinuate himself into a prosperous solicitor's household. "There are two of them, Bunter, two ladies lived in a bower, Binnorie, O Binnorie! The parlourmaid you have seen. Her name is Hannah Westlock. A woman in her thirties, I fancy, and not ill-favored. The other, the cook--I cannot lisp the tender syllables of her name, for I do not know it, but doubtless it is Gertrude, Cecily, Magdalen, Margaret, Rosalys or some other sweet symphonious sound--a fine woman, Bunter, on the mature side, perhaps, but none the worse for that." Servant names indeed! The cook's actual name is Mrs. Pettican; I think all cooks are "Mrs." regardless of marital status.
ReplyDeleteOh fantastic catch, plenty to look at there!
DeleteI think Hannah is one of those names that would have been seen as old-fashioned, Biblical, in my mother's generation. One of her friends disliked it so much she started calling herself Anne.
But now Hannah sounds modern, Anne old-fashioned.
Hannah, Dinah, Susannah were common Quaker names as well. (I'm from William Penn's old colony.). Bible names have also been common among the Amish down the centuries. Mary/Marie/Maria were often used as "prefixes" to girls' names too.
DeleteI didn't know that about Dinah - just knew it was Biblical.
DeleteI haven't seen it much outside books, but there are those names like Patience and Prudence - the poor girls must worry in case they don't live up to that.
In my reading on this I read that all the different versions of Mary make it the most common girls' name, although Mary as such doesn't feature that much in the UK these days...
Just found a website behindthename.com with name origins. There were apparently some names that weren't used in English until after the Reformation.
DeleteInteresting - because they weren't Catholic enough? Did everyone have saints' names till then...?
DeleteHannah, the maid, may have had no choice about her name. One of Saki [now there's a master of improbable but precisely right names!]'s characters renames all her maids "Jane".
DeleteLord Peter is being facetious, referencing a stanza from The Blessed Damozel: "five handmaidens, whose names are five sweet symphonies: Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret and Rosalys".
DeleteRoger: Did you see Saki and Esme in one of the comments below?
DeleteThe ladies who rename the maids are presented as hilarious eccentrics, where in real life surely stealing someone's name is a dreadful thing to do. I am stony-faced when I read of it.
Thank you for helpful info about Lord Peter - I did not know that reference.
Delete
DeleteNot a hilarious eccentricity in Saki's case@
"What I mean is," said Mrs. Riversedge, "that when I get maids with unsuitable names I call them Jane; they soon get used to it."
"An excellent plan," said the aunt of Clovis coldly; "unfortunately I have got used to being called Jane myself. It happens to be my name."
Ah yes. And indeed, Jane is one of those names that is classless and timeless (as mentioned above) - from queens on down.
DeleteThis sparked a memory of "Love in a Cold Climate" - a house party-full of society women flocking round the Duc de Sauveterre - "They all seemed to be old friends of his, called him Fabrice and had a thousand questions to ask about mutual acquaintances in Paris, fashionable French ladies with such unfashionable English names as Norah, Cora, Jennie, Daisy, May and Nellie. 'Are all Frenchwomen called after English housemaids?' Lady Montdore said rather crossly ..."
DeleteOh yes! another great catch, a quote I know perfectly well but had forgotten about. Thanks!
DeleteHaving been born in 1950, I went through school and early working years just cheek by jowl with other Susans. And then I went and named my daughter, 1975, Heather. No blame to either me or my mother. Both of us chose daughterly names long before we were of childbearing years, because we loved those fairly rare and attractive names. Apparently so did all our contemporaries. !!!
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, the only Beryl I've ever encountered is my Aunt Elsie, born 1924. It's her middle name, and she never understood where my grandparents came up with that one. But Elsie, well, that was a popular one back then.
One of my friends at school was given Elsie, and she hated it and insisted on using her second name. She managed to lose it forever at some point - she became a lawyer and made sure that her professional qualifications were in her chosen name.
DeleteI always associated the name with Elsie in the Katy books by Susan Coolidge, the least favourite sister.
Now Heather - forever associated with that film! Where it was a very cool name...
During my time at our local public health agency (2009-2015) I worked with no fewer than five RN's named Susan, all of them from the 1950-1960 age cohort. This in an office of fewer than one hundred people.
DeleteThat is impressive. it is surprising how important fashions are, and thus how many with a name, when there is such a wide variety available.
DeleteI love thinking about names and looking at the way they change. My mother always said no-one nowadays has her name - Eve - but in the last half dozen years the name has come whooshing back and there seem to be Eves or Evie in every class in school. Other names stay but in different forms or spellings. There are no Marys now, but the Welsh Mary - Mair - is still around though often it has changed spelling and become Miya. It's also interesting that when Chinese immigrants give their children English names to use in school, they give them the 'old-fashioned', traditional names - Gerald, Elizabeth, John - perhaps because they've looked them up in books.
ReplyDeleteIt's such a fascinating topic isn't it? I would say that some names get an A on the end and it makes the name more fashionable - Eva, Anna, Clara, Susanna...
DeleteI think at one time Indian immigrants in the UK had some English names that were similar to Indian names - Myra and Sheila came up quite often. Now I think they are more likely to choose whatever name they want.
Some names that were originally associated with a particular language or culture seem to become mainstream. I see lots of girls named Aaliyah now, though it's often spelled differently.
DeleteOh that's interesting - I will look out for that name.
DeleteI briefly taught English at a Chinese university and all of the students had English names to use in their English classes (otherwise they were called by their Chinese names). I did wonder a bit how they chose them and to what extent they were aware of their connotations. There were some names that I found definitely surprising, such as Lolita...
DeleteOh goodness, that must have been a surprise.
DeleteSomeone once told me what a mutual acquaintance had called her daughters, and my unguarded response was 'well they won't need to find stripper names later on will they?' but I am not going to say what they were! I can bowdlerize to 'drag names' these days...
It's also fascinating how names change gender. My uncle was known as Kay as a boy (it was actually his middle name) in the 1930s, but then Kay became a girl's name, so his family thought they'd start using his first name instead and stopped using Kay. But apparently at the time lots of boys were called Kay. The Welsh version Cai has become very popular over the last couple of decades.
ReplyDeleteI've never known a boy called Kay - but very memorably the boy in the Snow Queen is Kay, and so is the boy in John Masefield's Box of Delights.
DeleteJocelyn and Hilary were names for both sexes, but have really migrated to women for the most part now.
There's a Saki story in which Clovis picks a name for a fox, and says they must pick a name which could be for either sex. He chooses 'Esme' and I was very surprised at that idea when I first read the story. Not a common name now, but definitely female I would say.
I remember a Sir Kay from "The Once and Future King"--Arthur's brother maybe? All I really recall is that he had too much imagination which was a problem in training for war.
DeleteKay in the Arthur stories is an Anglicization of Cai who is mentioned in the old Welsh stories.
DeleteYes of course Marty and Ann - all connecting up!
DeleteNot Clovis, but his friend the Baroness... er... christens Esme, who doesn't long outlive his naming.
DeleteThank you for putting me right! I just went and re-read the story, which obv I didn't do before first mentioning it - what a vicious masterpiece it is. And of course (as you have kindly refrained from pointing out) it is a hyena, not a fox. I loved this sentence: 'She was looking more than ever like an albino beetroot.'
DeleteThe Bond Girl names sound a bit odd - I'd have expected Ruby, Violet, Pearl and Beryl to be in their 30s or 40s at least by 1963!
ReplyDeleteWell of course real Bond Girls have much stranger names - Honeychile and Domino and Vesper and Solitaire. And of course Tiffany - the name keeps cropping up
DeleteI was christened Shaila in 1955 but had my name chopped in half after I joined the Marines (except for one captain who called me Sheeler for the entire time I spent under his command. I think he was from New Joisey). Having lived about 2/3 of my life without meeting anyone with the same name, I now find myself surrounded by Shays, many of them African-American, and at least one Shay Simmons who pitched for the Atlanta Braves.
ReplyDeleteI meant to say at least one OTHER Shay Simmons. I also spent ten years working for a Middle Eastern software form where I learned that mine is a boy's name in Israel and a girl's name in India.
DeleteDid you mind having your name changed? You hear that a fair amount from people of our generation, one way or another - 'oh there were two people with my name in the class so they asked me my second name and I've been called that ever since': I heard that several times. I think nowadays those in authority would very much not be changing people's names...
ReplyDeleteNot the same, but in my son's nursery group there were identical twins, and the mother went to enormous lengths to do the right thing by them and make sure they had individual identities. But they could no nothing with the children, who called them 'Michael' and 'Other Michael' - you would worry about his chances of growing up balanced and assured in his place in the family.
"Did you mind having your name changed?" At that early point in my military career/ I was struggling so hard to get my feet back under me that a new name was the least of my problems.
DeleteI was far better off than a private first class in our unit named Salazar, who immediately became Salad Bar, or Corporal Macchione (Macaroni).
And a brand new warrant officer named (IIRC) Bolenskiewicz, who became B-12 after the very first roll call.
Yes indeed. And I don't quite know - should I be thinking 'it is very important that people's names are respected' or 'if they're in the armed forces and they can't cope with someone getting their name wrong, then they aren't tough enough.' What do you think?
DeleteThese two posts about names are overwhelming. The only thought I give to names in fiction is whether they are easy to remember.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I will concede that in historical fiction, the name should be one that was used in the time and the place, although it is unusual if I notice one way or the other. I like your examples of how Sarah Ward and Lissa Evans take care in choosing the names they use.
When I was named Tracy, my parents knew no other girls with that name (it was a family name), except that one news columnist for the Birmingham News had a daughter around the same time and named her Tracy. Everyone always assumed I was male until they met me. By time I was in my teens, there were many girls under 10 named Tracy and I have no idea where that came from.
It's so mysterious isn't it? sometimes it's easy to see where a name comes from, but more usually there is no explanation as to why one suddenly becomes popular. It's one of the reasons I'm so fascinated by the whole issue.
DeleteOne of my children had a name that was well-known but extremely uncommon in children of her age (Barbara) and the other had a name that was very widely-shared and always has been I think - Alexander. It made for quite a different experience in many ways.
Versions of this story have been in the news recently: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/viewpoint-how-persons-name-can-prompt-hiring-discrimination
ReplyDeleteThanks, very interesting link. I've seen versions of this before, and unfortunately it is all too believable. There have been attempts to anonymise applications (for colleges, jobs etc) to make it fairer, but it must be quite hard to do.
Delete