When name, identity and personality collide

August 6, 2007

You named your baby what?

Dexter?

There it was on the Babies-We-Have-Delivered bulletin board in the doctor's waiting room, with all the Emmas, Ethans, Emilys and Matthews.

Don't the parents know that the other kids will nickname him Sexter in the schoolyard, which won't make school — or indeed job interviews later on — more pleasant? What would one imagine the other little boys nicknamed Tucker Carlson, that blowhard bully in the bowtie on MSNBC? And why did little Tucker turn out the way he did?

I'll try not to rely on that puzzling but harmless best-seller Freakonomics, which claims to "turn conventional wisdom on its head" but in fact is composed of bog-standard conventional wisdom. Freakonomics says that giving your child peculiar names will damage his or her life chances. Who knew?

And I won't refer to celebrity baby names, partly because the definition of celebrity is so wide now. I don't know who Shannyn Sossamon is, but it doesn't surprise me that he or she named the baby Audio Science. Also, celebrities, even D-grade ones, tend to be rich and wealth is an ointment for the gashes the world gives you when your name is Moxie.

Namely speaking

It's unfair that we have judged other people on their appearance since we crawled out of the ooze and grew legs. But that habit is not going to change. Equally, we judge people based on the gormlessness of their names. That's not fair either, but at least obese people, whose condition was said in a recent news story to be "viral" by scientists who should know better, can go on a diet. Dexter's stuck with what his parents gave him.

We wanted you to be an individual, his parents will tell him, when he's alert enough to ask why. Or "Why, why, why, why," as he'll put it.

Giving a child a peculiar name won't make it individual, it will make it damaged. All the Emmas in this world (it's the most popular girl's name in Canada) aren't made duller by their ubiquity.

I personally loathe my own name. When I meet other Heathers, we groan in sympathy. In the Eighties, Heathers were known as preppie versions of vixens. In this era, I think of Heathers as short-haired, thick-legged women in those beige knee-length cropped pants that compensate for their comfort by being so astonishingly unattractive.

But life could be worse. I have a sister named Hazel. (She won't thank me for publicizing this. But I suspect that I, and not her name, am the source of her embarrassment.) And my girlfriend Marilyn (a name as common as Heather) doesn't particularly like her name but she has a sister named Edna. Think of that.

"There's some raw work pulled at the font from time to time, is there not?" wrote P.G. Wodehouse in a novel with a character named Lemuel Gengulphus Trotter. Wodehouse understandably wrote under his initials rather than Pelham Grenville.

After You're So Vain came out in 1972, Carly Simon, so named after Andrea Simon again failed to give birth to a longed-for son, was famous. An unusual-looking siren with a truly original name, she sent out postcards of her beauty with every album cover, and verily came forth a flood of Carlys, almost all of them homely. This is called the law of averages.

No matter how gorgeous the baby, never set the bar too high.

Creative spelling

And here's another piece of advice. Whatever the name, spell it correctly. This means spelling it the way it is generally spelled. Yes, Ethan is the most popular Canadian name for boys. But the list actually says Ethan/Ethen, which means many parents said, "Let's give him a really nice name, but make it individual." Ethen will irritate his schoolteachers for years, his driver's licence will be spelled correctly but wrongly, and he will never get off the no-fly list.

The same goes for Kaitlyn, Madisyn, Jakob, Kristofer and Leeah. "Micheal" is ridiculous. The ne plus ultra of misspelled names, the American actor Shia LaBeouf, appears in Disney action movies and teen comedies, which will pay for soothing ointment, as previously mentioned. LaBeouf's father was a circus clown (i.e., someone who thought The Beef was a cool showbiz name) and a Cajun (couldn't spell it in French). His mother's name was Shayna, and no more need be said.

I understand the subtext as well as you do, but I'll come right out and say it. Fanciful misspelled names scream "trailer park." Just as buying those plastic whiskey jugs the size of barbecue propane tanks doesn't announce "I'm throwing a party" at the liquor store checkout. It howls "alcoholic."

Signal core

Everything about us, the low-waistedness of our jeans and the blueness of the highlights in our hair, is a signal. The fact that you want to call it semiotics means that you took film courses in college and that you annoy people at parties.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book about this. He called it Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. If his publisher had titled it Snap Judgments, it wouldn't have been nearly so popular.

Snap judgments are what guide us. Blasted with bits of information, all digitized 1s and 0s, we need shorthand more than ever. Crude and stupid, it gives us little guidance to a world so complex that there is no longer any such creature as a genuine polymath.

I was shocked at a party the other night when I asked a documentary filmmaker what she was reading at the moment. (Never ask people about their own field; inevitably they've never heard of Sylvania Waters or even Nanook of the North, and an awkward silence ensues on both sides.)

She didn't have time to read, she told me, in a way that struck me as almost boastful. But perhaps that was unfair. I still haven't seen Jesus Camp. I asked her what book had influenced her most in her life, her films, anything. She was silent. "Can't think of one."

This was odd, as she was working on a documentary about a writer. I made the snap judgment she must make very boxed-in, dull documentaries, and she intuited that I was an irritant and a prude.

But I could tell that the instant I met her, by her glasses.

And she could do the same of me. I was wearing a sort of Japanese farm dress, by Irie Wash, which I had bought in Paris. I had it in my head that the designer was Welsh and I wanted to support Welsh factory workers laid off by Burberry. Also, I had never worn anything made of polyamide-elastanne before. I think it means pop bottles.

I was daft and the dress was not a success. Only a Heather would wear it. And that says it all.