Naming Names From birth names to stage names, from HUAC to gravestones, why your name becomes a form of fate.

“A man’s name is not like a mantle which merely hangs about him, and which one perchance may safely twitch and pull, but a perfectly fitting garment, which, like the skin, has grown over him, at which one cannot rake and scrape without injuring the man himself.”

—Goethe

Families waited, sick with nerves, forbidden to drive to the site of this February’s earthquake in Gaziantep, Turkey. Then the posts started to hit Twitter, yells from beneath broken stone: “I’m under rubble. My name is __.”

Names are how we find each other. They are our tags, the things someone tugs to gain our attention. They locate us in space and time; they hold us accountable; they make relationships possible. When someone uses your name, you know they know you, and their tone of voice tells you how well. As a kindergartener once announced, you know someone loves you when your name is safe in their mouth.

Even in this time of flux, with fluid identities and avatars that split us into separate selves, names write code for who we are. We bear someone’s name, take someone’s name, carry on a name, drop one. Names, in other words, have weight. They arrive with little suitcases that we roll along for the rest of our lives.

•  •  •

I was meant to be Julie. Or Bobby Sue. My dad was not overfond of my mother’s sister Julie. My mom was not overfond of country-western anything. At the nth hour, in desperation, she suggested her own name—because how could he object? In that single stroke, like a wisewoman in a fairy tale, she saved her city-born daughter from a lifetime as Bobby Sue.

I should have been grateful, but I hated Jeannette. Girlie, overlong, doubly doubled, devoid of fun. Jeanne would have been okay; it was the “ette” where the shame hid. A Jeannette is a prissy little girl whose mother buys her special pink tutus for ballet class. She avoids grass, sneakers, and pranks. She practices the piano without being told.

You could rip all that away from the name, I suppose, and it would still be the image I was terrified others saw when they looked at me. But a name is easy to blame. It is the first handshake between you and the world. It is your parents’ first step toward knowing you. It holds their vision for you, connecting you to an ancestor, a place, or a hero. Or, it is chosen by default, as mine was, and you begin as a compromise.

How many of us, I wonder, love our names?

“My grandfather would have loved to have met you,” he told her huskily. “He would have called you ‘She Moves Trees Out of His Path.’”

—Patricia Briggs, Hunting Ground

Those engaged in the study of proper names (onomastics) tell us that if your name is Louis, you have a higher chance of living in St. Louis, and more geologists are Georges, and more dentists are Dennises. In “On Synchronicity,” Carl Jung could not resist pointing out that Freud, whose name meant joy, gave us the pleasure principle; Adler, meaning eagle, theorized about the will to power; and Jung, whose name meant young, was interested in rebirth.

Coincidences charm us, but how much of our life does a name shape?

It certainly shapes others’ response to us. A Canadian professor emailed students a questionnaire, rigging it so that in each case, the sender had the same first name as the recipient. Compliance shot up.

Back in 1954, researchers found that boys “with peculiar first names were more likely to be severely emotionally disturbed.”

A more recent study found that boys with names that sounded feminine misbehaved more than the norm when they hit middle school (and felt a need to prove themselves).

Teachers have been shown to give higher grades to essays they think were written by students with attractive names. In a different study, essays by students with unattractive names received lower grades than essays by unnamed pupils. Participants asked to evaluate student résumés spent more time reviewing those of students with names similar to their own, recalled more of those résumés’ content, and gave those students more glowing evaluations.

It was the names that glowed.

“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.”

—W.C. Fields

Maybe my dad did not really want me to be Bobby Sue. Maybe he was teasing my mom, using the name as a bargaining chip. She folded first by tossing out her own name—which was, legally, her middle name. Only now (too late to ask) does it occur to me that she must have hated her first name, too.

At least she had an untainted alternative. My middle name was Ann, after the sharp-tongued, child-hating grandmother who used to snap at me to put my book down and go outside to play. When I was still too young to foresee a lifetime of nervous explanations to Customs, the IRS, and the DMV, I stuck an “e” on the end—which looked prettier, I insisted—but which also wedged a little more distance between me and my nemesis.

And so, instead of being Bobby Sue, who would have worn ripped jeans and climbed fences, I was the second Jeannette in the family, tagged “Baby Jeannette” for far longer than age-appropriate.

At least the name only caused confusion and occasional winces; it made no special demands of me. It would be far harder to be a male Junior—or a III or IV. Your patriarchal script is already written, and you must fall into line. What if you do not fancy procreation, and the name comes to a full stop with you? Juniors swing either docile or rebellious (unless they are so thoroughly mature, they live their own lives regardless).

The handing down of the father’s name is called namesaking. Often it is strategic, “a mechanism to increase perceived parent-child similarity and, consequently, parental investment.” Mothers hope their partners will be more likely to dote—and less likely to harbor suspicions about their son’s parentage—if he bears their name. Parents hope sons will live up to—and guard—the family name.

My colleague at The Common Reader, John Griswold, was born into an unbroken line of fathers and sons that traces back at least as far as the year 1200, to a John Griswold in Warwickshire, England. When I ask TCR’s John if he feels a weight of responsibility, he shakes his head. “It’s more of an oddity to me, to have learned that. I grew up with my dad absent and my mom cursing his name.”

The elder of his two sons (another John Griswold) is fascinated by the discovery. Both boys hope to have sons someday, John says, to keep the tradition unbroken. “I keep telling them it doesn’t matter.”

•  •  •

A gentle theologian and storyteller, Belden Curnow Lane was named for his great-grandfather, who lived in Cornwall. “Belden,” more commonly a surname, means “beautiful hill.” “So I am a place,” Belden tells me, the delight of it warming his voice even now.

Years ago, he took his son camping in Cornwall. After two miserable, rain-drenched nights, they found a B&B, and he looked out its window and saw the rise of a misty green hill, the Atlantic ocean ribboned behind it, the ruins of a tenth-century chapel at its base. “I had this deep sense of having found a home,” he says. “I recognized that hill.”

Our names connect us to what they symbolize. They connect us to distant relatives on Ancestry.com, to those who knew our parents and grandparents, to one another. They draw us into community.

Even if we loathe our name, we thrill to hear it spoken. Murmured in a conversation ten feet away at a noisy party, it will ring out clearly, as though someone just jacked up the volume on that word alone. Our hungry little egos defer to those who remember our name. After watching university presidents, politicians, and CEOs with amazing name recall, I would tell anyone with a genie to make that one of their three wishes. It just about guarantees that you will be beloved—because by remembering people’s names, you convince them they matter.

“‘You used,’ he said, and then took a sharp breath, ‘to call me Augustus.’”

—John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

Kids hunt like truffle pigs for a nickname, so as a schoolboy, Belden Lane wound up with “Belly,” which did not thrill him. Once he shook “Belly,” though, he was never anything but Belden—until his baby granddaughter, Ella, christened him Babu. The name, now his for six years, melts in his mouth; he cannot say it without smiling.

Live right, and you end up with a string of silly names, pet names, private nicknames bestowed by people who love you. At least, I always thought so. In three decades, my husband and I have not devised anything cuter than “babe” and “sweetheart.” We rarely even pronounce one another’s names, except to others. It seems too distant, like holding out my arm and keeping him at a remove, to preface a remark with “Andrew.” I have used this man’s toothbrush.

My friends, though, I begged to shorten “Jeannette.” Only a few complied, giving me J or Jen or Nette, an intimate shorthand I loved. Still, they were derivative little names with no color to them. I felt like Alice when Humpty Dumpty said pityingly,  “With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost.” What could I do, how could I live, to warrant a tag with more character?

A truly good nickname is a work of art, a clever fusion of who someone is and how their friends feel about them. Musicians know this. Ironing Board Sam, Ivory Joe Hunter, Muddy Waters, Bumble Bee Slim, Cow Cow Davenport, Pinetop Perkins, Taj Mahal, T-Bone Walker, Bird, Baby Sweets, Fats Waller, Satchmo, Snoop Dogg, Bad Bunny—the names are light and wry and knowing, so different from the moneyed nicknames, like Muffy and Mimi and Flip and Chip and Trip for those triple Roman numerals.

Your porn star name is your first dog plus the street you grew up on. Which would make me Magoo Bellerive, so it is a good thing I am not on that career path. The next time someone slaps one of those Hi My Name Is stickers on my bosom, though, I just might scribble it in. I dream of going to a big cocktail party filled with strangers and, when one of them asks my name, inventing one on the spot. Just daring to do it feels deliciously risky; surely that would color the personality that emerged….

At what point did we have enough audacity to begin playing with our names? There have always been pseudonyms, but they used to belong only to grifters, writers, mystics, and mercenaries. George Eliot and George Sand needed noms de plume, lest their beautiful writing be cast aside because it had been inked by a woman. A man who ran away to join the French Foreign Legion needed a nom de guerre to escape his dark past.

Hollywood knew from the start that a name colors you in. Could Archibald Leach have stunned us the way Cary Grant did? What if Natalie Portman were still Neta-Lee Hershlag, or Lady Gaga were Stefani Germanotta, or Bob Dylan’s surname were still Zimmerman, or Sigourney Weaver had kept Susan and Lorde had stuck with Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor?

Now we all share in the fun, because pseudonyms have moved from the silver screen to any screen. Never did I ever think I would see a letter to The New York Times signed Queen of Feral Cats. When I edited a city magazine, I fought that trend hard, refusing to print emailed letters unless a proper name was attached. (Jeannettes are prissy, remember?) In the end, I had to admit defeat. We have acclimated to the avatars. Wacky or obnoxious online names suffice as proof of authorship. Aaron Lewis even defends them as alternate identities: “If we’re lucky, new ideas about identity will leak out from the pseudonymous internet into mainstream culture. And we’ll begin to think anew about what it means to have a self in the information age.”

Lewis set up an alternate identity on Twitter, and it untethered him. He feels a new “freedom to explore grief, emotional blockages, and cognitive dissonances that feel too personal to make public.” The account using his real name, meanwhile, stays “mostly silent and sterile.”

We are afraid to be known, recognized, held accountable, canceled. Yet we long to walk into a bar where everybody knows our name.

“Letitia! What a name. Halfway between a salad and a sneeze.”

—Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

My favorite children’s book is Don’t Call Me Little Bunny. To reach the name “Martin Chuzzlewit,” Dickens ripped through Sweezlebach, Cottletoe, Sweetletoe, Pottletoe, Spottletoe, Chuzzletoe, Chuzzlebog, Chubblewig, and Chuzzlewig. When Henry James schemed about his next novel, he said, “I want her name moreover, her Christian one, to be Moyra, and must have some bright combination with that; the essence of which is a surname of two syllables and ending in a consonant—also beginning with one.” For my amateur stab at a murder mystery, I spent longer choosing the characters’ names than writing the thing. So much suddenly mattered: whether the sound was crisp or soft, the name simple or fussy, the hints at ethnic origin and class accurate….

When looking for a relationship or hiring for a job, people lean toward names that sound fairly modern, I guess assuming that those with old-fashioned or unusual names must have dorky parents who raised them in Victorian mansions or hippie communes. But every century or so, the yellowed, musty names are in vogue again. Ten years ago, would you have bet on Olivia, Emma, Charlotte, Amelia, and Ava as the most popular? Amelia was my paternal grandmother’s name, and I am now grandmother age. For boys, the hot names are now Liam, Noah, Oliver, Elijah, James. As in King James, and the Prophet Elijah, and the dude with the ark. The Social Security Administration tracks these waves, so we know it has been seventeen years since the era of Madison, thirty-two since Brittany and Ashley. I feel old just hearing that. The names of the girls I grew up with—Lisas, Susans, Lindas, and (God help the innocent ones) Karens—are long gone.

Are the cutesy respellings over, too? No more Krystyn, Aymie, Heathyr, Heighlee, Ja’azmyne, Mahkynzee, Gyniffur, or Souzenne? Those spellings annoyed the hell out of traditionalists, emerging as they did from an era of heightened individualism, with everyone vying for attention and self-expression and identity the overriding quest.

That trajectory continues. In the future, predicts Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly, “having your first name decided by your parents will be as unfashionable as having them pick who you marry.” Already, a bill has been proposed in New Mexico to allow fourteen-year-olds to change their names without parental consent.

“They are trying to destroy the family unit. This is a rogue government,” someone tweets. Then someone else points out that “some parents tagged their kids with horrific first names, ‘Blanket’ comes to mind.”

Oh, there is worse. Florida records show legal names Sweet Tart, Silver Ware Jr., Mac Aroni, Helen May Buck, and, for twins, Beginning and End, and Nip and Tuck. The author of Names lists Sibyl Bibble, Birdie Tinkle, Serious Misconduct, Preserved Fish, and Doodle Dangle Wang. What are parents thinking? Other countries intervene: Quebec has forbidden parents from naming their child Peeseth (which apparently sounds like the French slang for “penis”), Spatule (a spoon), and Lucifer. New Zealand said no to 4Real but okayed Violence. Japan nixed Akuma, which means devil. Quite a few countries keep lists of pre-approved names. In Germany, a name must make the child’s gender obvious. Until 1966, a baby born in France had to be given a saint’s name. Even the hyperindividualistic U.S. has banned “Adolph Hitler,” “Jesus Christ,” “Messiah,” and “Santa Claus.”

Until now, there has been a strong correlation between how popular a kid was and how pleasing or cool the kid’s name was. But does the old bias still hold, in a world where kids are named Story or Apple or Oak or Aero or Ember? Dogs now get the proper human names, with Max or Lola replacing Rover or Spot. The symbolism makes sense, because dogs are now full-fledged family members rather than lawn ornaments. As for naming humans after objects or shrubbery, why not? The more variation, the less prejudice, one hopes.

Names are how we sort and file one another. Names, therefore, can do damage.

Parents who lose a child and then give that name to the next child, hoping a clean substitution will erase their grief, might as well sling a hundred-pound weight onto those tiny shoulders. A relative’s name, bestowed for reason of family politics or a grudging sense of duty, feels different than a name lovingly chosen. Some names are so bland and common, a kid feels lost in the crowd; others so rare they feel conspicuous and constantly self-conscious.

Ashwini Selvakumaran so dreaded the other kids’ reaction to her first name that she started telling them, “You can call me Ash.” She was never going to find Ashwini on the key tags at a road-trip gas station. If Romper Room were still on the air, Miss Lois would never hold up her magic mirror and said, “I see Sally…and Billy…and Ashwini….”

Ashwini is the Sanskrit word for star. Ash is the residue from a cigarette.

Ariella Fogel shortened her lovely Jewish name to Ari, tired of people butchering it. No, more than that: “It was always an attempt to hide my Judaism from those who I believed either could not or did not want to understand it.” But the more she steeped herself in Jewish history and Hebrew and Israeli culture, the more she loved her name. She writes eloquently about this shift for Jewish Women, Amplified.

But the byline is Ari Fogel.

•  •  •

“Could you just call me Pigeon?” he asked the teacher when she read his name.
“Does your mother call you Pigeon?”
“No.”
“Then to me you are Paul.”
…
“Nathan Sutter,” the teacher read.
“My mother never calls me Nathan.”
“Is it Nate?”
“She calls me Honeylips.”

—Brandon Mull, The Candy Shop War

Asma Elgamal gets so tired of people struggling with her name that she tells the barista to write “Sarah” on her cup—“but it feels like treason.” People with nice, easy first names make up aliases at Starbucks, too—but because they resent the commercial manipulation of our identity. They do not want to be flattered by first-namey pseudo-intimacy. They do not want their real name yelled out, any more than they want the contents of their backpack strewn on a public sidewalk.

My name never felt quite that private to me—after all, I shared it from the start. Also, I prefer even pseudo-intimacy to bureaucratic reserve. Our culture is thoroughly casual; we can no longer convey warmth by saying, “Call me [first name],” because people start there.

I do love the idea of inventing new names for different purposes, though. When I was little, I did so regularly. “Today, my name is Barbara,” I might announce. My great-aunts, who lived with us, kept up as best they could, mouthing the Name of the Day to one another as a reminder. Already I sensed that a change in name could hand me an entirely different life.

Yet when it came time for me to pick my confirmation name—and my fate finally rested in my own hands—I chose terribly. Not only does “Veronica” conjure a vintage comic strip, but she has been evicted from the litany of the saints. Apparently nobody believed the story that made me choose her, about how she handed Jesus her veil to wipe his bloody, sweaty face as he carried the cross, and when he handed it back, the cloth bore his image. That story was made for romantic nine-year-old girls.

Later, I left the church and tried to forget Veronica. Friends who went in the other direction, entering religious orders, gave up their “given names,” severing ties to their old life, and received new ones. (Interesting, how the language of naming emphasizes giving and taking, the name first separate from us, then acquired or rejected.)

In the old days, a mother superior might insist that you become Sister Scholastica or Sister Reparata. These days, women are often allowed to choose their new name. Priests, on the other hand, usually keep their given name—is less self-sacrifice expected of them? By analogy, married men traditionally keep their surname while women change theirs.

From my teens through my twenties, I longed for that marital name change, feminism be damned. My “maiden” name was even worse than my first name: “Batz,” a short, barked German syllable with a flat “a” and comical “z” and bonus jokes about belfries. Girls used to write their hoped-for married name over and over again, swooning with love. I tested the boys’ names for aesthetics.

Jim Monhart, for example, was a really nice guy. I did not necessarily want to marry him. But I wanted his name. I thought “Jeannette Monhart” looked pretty. This was, I did realize, an insufficient reason to wed. Besides, I found a man so sweet, he offered to take my name if I preferred. “Cooperman will be just fine,” I assured him hastily. Nor did I want to hyphenate; I had watched too many friends wind up the only one in their family with a different name than everybody else. The kids got the husband’s name. The wife was the only one with hers. This was progress?

“I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.”

—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Capulet, Montague—all that holds those smitten fourteen-year-olds apart is their surnames, which place them on opposite sides of a family feud. “What’s in a name?” Juliet demands. “That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.”

But would it? A rose by any other name would still wear its petals as layered petticoats; would still be “strangely delicate/and self-lit—to the very edge,” as Rilke describes it. But there would have been no War of the Roses, no Rosicrucians, no consensus on what to send your lover, throw at a diva’s feet, or bite between your teeth in a hot flamenco dance. Culture layers meaning into a name.

Three centuries after Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein described a woman named Rose: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” The repetition left us time to weave literary and artistic allusions in with the botanical.

What if my name were Rose? It is easy—and comforting—to say that I would be the same no matter what. But if people react differently to you, that shapes what you show them. To be called something so formal, sentimental, old-fashioned, and layered with symbolism? I would have to walk around muttering Hemingway’s parody: “A rose is a rose is an onion.”

“It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.”

—Kathy Acker, In Memoriam to Identity

Jews do not speak God’s name. They have not uttered YHWH since the early fifth century BCE. As a result, no one remembers how to pronounce it. Ask a chatbot, and you will probably be told that this was a scrupulous overreaction to the third commandment, Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy god in vain. Ask a rabbi, and you will be reminded that God is beyond names. “In many traditional cultures, when you name someone, you have a power over them,” Belden Lane explains. “For God to be named is in some subtle way to reduce God’s power.”

God was generous with naming rights—that was Adam’s first big job—but cagey about His own name. Finally, Moses demanded to know it. How could he be the messenger of an entity he could not name? He would have no authority. So God murmured those four consonants (ancient Hebrew had no vowels) and a cryptic “I am that I am.” Meanwhile, God freely messed with others’ names: “Thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name.” “Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham.” “As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be.” Jesus continued the tradition, giving Simon the surname Peter, which meant rock, as a reminder that he must lay a stable foundation for a new church. “In the name of the Father.”

All of this is plucked, male pronouns intact, from the Judeo-Christian tradition. But the first human whose name we know is probably Kushim, who signed a barley receipt in Mesopotamia five thousand years ago. Kushim, the tablet says, and simple as that, everything changes. “We are beginning,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, “to hear history through the ears of its protagonists.”

(Shutterstock)

“Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.”

—Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

Calling in to All There Is, Anderson Cooper’s tender podcast about grief, people make it a point to say aloud the full name of the person they have lost. The calls turn into an All Souls Day litany, name after beloved name, standing in for entire lives.

“Say their names!” protesters yell, the list growing longer with every death of a Black person at the hands of police.

Every year, the names of Polish officers massacred in 1940 by Soviet secret police are read out loud in solemn ceremony. On the Day of Political Prisoners, the names of the victims of Stalin’s crimes ring out in front of the Solovetsky Stone in Moscow.

A silent cemetery visit is not enough. These names need to vibrate in our collective memory.

In her freshman year at Yale, Maya Lin stretched out her arm every time she walked through Yale University’s Memorial Rotunda, tracing the hollows in the rough stone to feel the names of alumni who had died for their country. Later, encouraged by an architecture professor, she entered a national design competition for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Her design etched nearly 58,000 names, listed chronologically, into a V of polished black granite that cut into the earth. “A veteran can find his or her own time on the wall,” she explained, “and all visitors would be able to see themselves reflected in the names.”

Jan Scruggs, a wounded and decorated Vietnam War vet, had launched the campaign for this memorial, and his first requirement was including the names of the dead and missing. “Anybody who didn’t, it was returned,” he tells me, “‘Better luck next time.’”

We are talking about this essay on Zoom, and in his gray hoodie, he looks relaxed, his eyes clear and filled with light. His voice is occasionally gruff but always warm. “You might want to start with people’s graves,” he suggests. “Start from there, and you might well figure out a way to write about the power of names.”

I think of a friend who so misses his mother, he cannot bear to order her gravestone, because carving her name in stone will make the loss final. I remember searching for hours for a loved one’s gravestone, and the weird, irrational panic of not finding it, as though that somehow made a difference. In Haiti during the cholera epidemic, the swift mass burials, nameless, made me shudder.

There is nothing sadder than an unmarked grave.

Displaying the names of those lost in Vietnam was, to Scruggs, “poetic justice. These were the people everyone wanted to forget.” He leans back, remembering. “We even called the Institute for the Preservation of Southern Culture to find out how to do Billy Bob, because William Robert would have caused the parents to say, ‘Is that some Yankee?’”

What a difference from the recent Korean War Memorial debacle, with more than one thousand names misspelled. (Just one example: Frederick Bald Eagle Bear, killed as he rallied his infantry squad against an attack, is listed as Eagle B F Bald.)

At the end of our conversation about warriors and honor and honoring names, Scruggs blurts, unprompted, “I hate my name. I tell sophisticated people I’m from Sweden. When I think about the pain it caused me every year from first to twelfth grade! First day: ‘Okay, all the girls go over here. Jan Scruggs?’”

It took him decades to realize he could just change his name. By then, he was in the middle of planning the memorial. People were calling him, writing him. He had made a name for himself.

“Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

―J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

The worst Jewish curse? Yimach shemo: “May his name be erased.”

Many on the left wanted to do that to Donald Trump. “Don’t say his name!” they yelled at the screen. Cut off the attention. Just use “the president.” Had the media been willing to comply, would the omission have cast him as Lord Voldemort, unspeakably evil—or just made him pout?

Anonymity is a strange thing. It can free people to behave badly. It can protect them from harm or unwanted attention. It can hide their light. (“For most of history,” Virginia Woolf reminds us, “Anonymous was a woman.”)

Anonymity can also pose a puzzle. I once flirted with a guy at a party by not telling him my name—such a simple ploy, but he could not let it rest. Forgetting a name is equally maddening: Freud begins The Psychopathology of Everyday Life with a time he blanked on an artist’s name and his mind supplied two incorrect names. He stewed for days and wound up spinning an elaborate theory about the deeply buried cause of his slip.

Would that all of us agonized thus. Have you ever watched someone begin to introduce a woman they have probably already slept with and blank on her name? Forgetting names terrifies me for other reasons—is it the first sign of dementia? Will this person whose name I ought to know decide I think myself too important to bother remembering them? Not only might the forgetting hurt their feelings, but it also snaps connections—to them, to the past, to my own experience, to my own brain.

Authors and playwrights sometimes deliberately avoid naming a character, a trick stolen from medieval allegory as a way to suggest universality. Names specify and separate, and these days, they also brand and commodify. When Prince Rogers Nelson wanted to make a point about the recording studio commodifying him by trademarking his given name, he changed it to an unpronounceable, untypable hieroglyph.

In Nazi concentration camps, names were replaced with numbers. Prisoners are tagged with numbers, too. The fastest shorthand for the soullessness of bureaucracy is that people become “just a number,” as they do in most dystopian science fiction.

Names establish personhood.

In The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, Walter Mosley names a character Minister Brock. “What church your daddy preach at?” Grey asks the man’s son.

“He ain’t no preacher,” comes the reply. “My grandfather named him that so if you used his first name you had to respect him anyway.”

I asked my husband what other first names might suit me. He looked bemused; once someone is part of your life, they are their name. But a few days later, he announced, “I thought of two. You might hate this, but Winifred—Win for short. Or Robin.”

Feeling like neither a female honey-loving bear or a spring bird, I told him “Jeannette” would do. Saying I hate my name has become a habit, but in truth, it has grown on me. I have grown into it. I can even cope with the “ette.” Does that mean I have made my peace with how my mother saw me? Or ceased to care how the rest of the world sees me?

At some point, you make your name your own.

Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.