Would a rose by any other name...
Names are a strange thing. So much power, and yet...John, for example, has some pretty severe name problems. Maybe disassociation is the word? His legal name is John. To his Polish family, it's Jan, but they call him by his diminutive name, Jaś, said 'Yash'. His English speaking family, to a person, calls him Pumpkin. In school in French immersion, he was often called Jean. On the internet, he normally uses Johnny. I call him by a random assortment of pet names, and only sometimes by his first name. To no one's great surprise, he has trouble with names, both realizing when someone is talking to him, as well as remembering other people's names.
My name is Morgan, for which there are no easy nicknames. There's not even a French equivalent, so in school it was just 'Morgan' with a French accent. There were, however, a random assortment of pet names from my parents. Nothing fixed like Pumpkin though - when we first were dating, I'd be talking to his mother and say something about John and she'd have no idea who I was talking about - for them it's not a nickname, it's his name. His Full, Real Name. (And yes, it creeps me out. I mean, he's 24. Names that are cute for a toddler are a lot less cute for a grown man.)
But for all I'm pretty comfortable with my first name as being Me, I don't tend to hear it much. John doesn't use names if he can possibly help it. (I think we'd been dating for 3 years before he called my parents by name.) My parents tend to use pet names. Most people, especially in the business world, tend to avoid names, at least that I've seen. Even in person with friends, it's more, 'hey!' than 'hello Morgan'.
The result is that every time anyone calls me by name, I flinch a little. Maybe flinch is the wrong word. Twitch? Start? Am surprised, at any rate. Even in the body of an email it has the power to surprise me.
Am I the freak here or is this an example of how casual our society has become, that first names are so little used? Or is this merely my experience, painted clearer because of John's obvious name confusion? How does identity fit in to all this?
I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I really wish I had Ginny's knowledge of theory and ability with words. I'm fumbling around my point here - it's not really clear in my own head. Today my friend Tina sent me an email about the inlaws that started with, "Oh Morgan. They’re going to h8 you no matter what you do, aren’t they?" The sight of my name was a short - almost a highlighting of what she was trying to say. Same thing when my boss uses it in conversation.
Sigh. I don't have an ending for this as I barely have a beginning. I'm thinking a lot recently, about things, and I swear to god, the more I think, the more tangled I get. Off to ice the best god damn cake my inlaws have ever eaten.
Labels: identity, life, the boy, writing
posted by Morgan @ 9:01 a.m.
3 Comments:
I totally wasn't the best god damn cake ever. Martha lied to me.
Oh! I hadn't caught this entry! But man, I wish I had earlier, because this is something I think about all the time. Partly because, yes, naming features not only in literature but in literary criticism, but mostly because I feel the same shock and discomfort at hearing my name you describe, though I felt for most of my life that my name did not suit me. (I'm coming to accept it more, but I still never say it; nor do I like people who say it too much to me.)
One thing that I think is that we tend, in our supposedly non-magical-thinking age, to ignore is the way naming is power. You know how in sales handbooks you're supposed to call the other person by name when you're persuading them of something? That's not really because it puts them at ease or makes them feel you know them. It's because it shows them that you have power over them. You've called them out where they live, and now they have to answer. People who use names too much are, I think, almost invariably pushy.
But naming or renaming is also, of course, a way to express the posession of closeness -- one of the things about John's parents, maybe, is that their insistence on the baby-name they gave him may feel like a way to keep all other comers out. As colleagues or adult friends (or you) could hardly call him "Pumpkin," that means there is a John that belongs, consistenly, only to them. That kind of naming doesn't have to be negative -- in fact, I think it usually isn't. But it is by definition exclusionary.
There are whole books of theory about naming, of course, which I have not read, but maybe someday I will. Then I'll get back to you with the Real Answer!
The name thing has always been complicated for me, because people are always calling me versions of my name that I don't really like. My legal first name is Katharine, but everyone, since I came out of the womb, has always called me Katie. (Why do parents name their kids things they never intend to call them?) For the last 23 years, I have been explaining to teachers, bosses, and a variety of other people that my name is KATIE, that I won't even respond to Katharine. (And then on the rare occasions I do use Katharine, I have to correct people on the spelling, and nobody believes me when I tell them there are two a's in it. Apparently people think I don't know how to spell my own name?) THEN, 99% of all people who don't know me very well feel comfortable enough with me that they call me Kate, a nickname which I only use on the internet and never anywhere else, because I think it sounds stuffy. (Even my friends flinch when someone calls me Kate -- it doesn't sound right at all!) And then about half the people who do understand that I prefer to be called Katie call me my first and last name togehter, Katie Fields, all the time, rather than just my first name, I guess because it's so darned catchy.
Also, my grandmother calls me Katie Beth, and since coming to college, I've acquired the moniker Katie Bob. Almost everyone greets me with, not hello, but, "KATIE BOB FIELDS!" And then anyone who doesn't know me asks, "Is that really your middle name?" GAH!
I don't know. I get tired of having to explain my name to people. I just wish I'd had a nice boring normal name without nicknames and with a normal spelling. It gets kind of annoying.
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