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The agony of a dumb name
E
ish, but some parents can be careless, or stupid, or even
cruel, when it comes to naming their offspring! You may
remember a song sung by Johnny Cash in the late 60s
entitled A Boy Named Sue about a wandering father who,
knowing he's not going to be around to see his kid grow up,
names the boy Sue in the hope that he'll thereby learn to fight
his way through in a man's world.
That's a funny, mythical example of how a brainfart decision
taken at the time of the child's birth can saddle the poor mite
with a lifetime of anguish and confusion.
Some are given frankly silly names: Ziggy Stardust. Phoenix
Racing Cloud Theron. OK, Ziggy Stardust wasn't a real person,
just a figment of David Bowie's songwriting skills, but it's hardly
surprising that Phoenix Racing Cloud Theron is currently doing
time for murdering her mother.
Some families name their kids most unimaginably. I know a
Greek family who named their son Dimitri and their daughter
Dimitra. Lovely names, both, but considering they weren't
twins (when some might say such a naming is “cute”) what
about the wealth of other Greek names to choose from?
Stavros? Democrates? Thedorus? Ioannis? And to make matters
worse the father had a brother with whom he was very close
(until, like many Greek families, they had a permanent falling
out) who also named his son Dimitri.
Some go overboard with the names. I once employed a man
whose “European” name was Washington. He told the tale of
how, when his mother was pregnant with him and his twin, his
father took her to Durban for a holiday. Walking around town
one day she came to an intersection where she saw a street
sign. One street was named Washington, and the other
Wellington, and she decided there and then that they would be
great names for her babies. So one was named Washington and
the other Wellington. And so pleased was she with her
inventiveness that when a third child came along some time
later she named him Wellington as well!
Another naming habit which is strange to me is to give the child
the same first name as his surname. There's Tlali Tlali, sometime
spokesman for SA Airways and the National Prosecuting
Authority. And of course there's our Chief Justice, Mogoeng
Mogoeng. How many times during his rise up the judicial
ladder must officious little clerks of the court wondered, when
he signed some weighty legal document, why he needed to
practice spelling his name?
And it should never be allowed that a father of a newly-born
child be put in charge of registering the birth.
My wife had an aunt whose official name was Mary. Her
mother, however, wanted to name her Marcinah after the
beautiful heroine in a play she had seen. On the day of the
child's birth the father, who happened to be the magistrate of
Philippolis, proudly went off to his office to fill in the Birth
Register (at the time one of the duties of a magistrate). By the
time he arrived, however, he'd
forgotten the rather exotic
name his wife had chosen, and
simply wrote down Mary.
Then there's the horrible habit
of giving a child a string of
names, then actually using a
name other than the first one. I
am a victim of such abuse, and
the fact that I have not spent
my life in therapy is a wonderment to me
I was named George Peter
William after my father,
George, and my two grandfathers (both of English origin).
However, I was born at a time
when it was fondly hoped that Engelsmanne and Afrikaners
would join together in some joyous (white) national melange,
so my father, who as a civil servant was also responsible for
entering my name in the Births Register, thought he'd give me a
head-start in the race to perfect (white) nationhood by entering
me as George Pieter William. But, to avoid confusion with him,
I was called, by the family, Piet.
Which was fine (although I took a bit of a ribbing at school)
until I attempted to use my names in my first job, which
entailed meeting people of many nationalities in the maritime
industry.
The habit was to introduce oneself with a business card, so my
first cards were as “George PW”. I quickly realised that was a
mistake as people thought me rude or deaf when I didn't react
to calls for “George”. So I had cards printed that named me as
Piet. And that worked only as long as it took some illiterate
English merchant navy officer to decide to phonetically
pronounce my name “Pie-ette” .
WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS, FOR SMALLHOLDERS