One of the things I learned back when I was pregnant and looking at potential names for my kid was that there were people out there who are WAY more obsessed with names than I am (and all those links are only just the ones where I don’t point to specific posts, as i do below). Just as there are book bloggers and food bloggers and DIY bloggers and cloth diapering (I am SO SERIOUS) bloggers, there are name bloggers. They are prolific.
They also taught me that everything I thought I knew about names were wrong.
For instance, while I thought “traditional” names were things like Michael and Elizabeth, they showed me that the Pilgrims on the Mayflower were naming their kids Journey, Oceanus, Wrestling, and Truelove, and that names I thought were very modern, like Chad, actually have roots dating back to 7th century saints.
When I complained about “boy” names like Hunter and James being used on girls, they reminded me that names like Lindsay, Ashley, Carol, and Kimberly were all “boy names” until relatively recently. Names like “Ashton” very nearly went girl, too, until a male celebrity yanked it back into the “blue” territory.
When I was curious about “weird” names, they informed me that the naming traditions so often attributed these days to celebrities or teen moms is actually as old as naming itself. For instance, did you know that the medieval queen Eleanor of Aquitane’s grandmother was named Dangereuse?!?!? Talk about a hot name! And when you find out that 7th century residents of Cornwall were named things like Loveday and Applyn, you’re inclined to give Gwyneth Paltrow a break.
(Speaking of “celebrity names” — the ones that make the news are… well, the ones who make the news. Many of the richest people in Hollywood give their kids names no one thinks are weird at all. Tom Hanks named his first two kids Colin and Elizabeth, Jim Carrey’s daughter is named Jane, and Ray Romano has a Gregory, Alexandra, Matthew, and Joseph! Name blogs taught me that, too.)
When I began to question the “proper” spelling of a given name, they taught me how slippery spelling has always been. Sometimes people spelled their OWN name a variety of ways, as they felt like it. The name I used for my daughter has a variety of spellings (as does my own name) and though we use the most popular (in the US) one (again, just like my name) people tend to assume the spelling they first came across is the “right” one.
So now, I worry less when I see a reader response to my book that questions the names.
When some reader calls Giovanni a stupid name, I think to myself, “this reader must not be aware that it’s as basic as it gets — in Giovanni’s mom’s home country of Italy, where it means ‘John.'” (And where it falls in the expected top-20 of naming popularity).
When they make fun of Astrid, I think, “Join the club. Astrid has been forced to witness her name being made fun of all her life by Americans who don’t realize what a popular choice it is in Scandanavia (top 50 in several countries), where Astrid’s parents met.” The characters in that book all have unusual names, because their families are part of a very specific heritage and name their children in reflection of that heritage. I got some snickers at Philippa’s name (though it’s always been way more common in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand) when Rampant came out, in 2009, but not anymore — a certain royal wedding attendant sent Philippa (who is close to the age of the fictional Philippa) to the very tip top of naming trends.
When they question the wisdom of me naming a character’s (male) love interest Yves (usually while misspelling it “Eve”), I shrug it off. Maybe they didn’t have that cute kid named Yves in their neighborhood growing up, like I did. Like the real Yves I knew, the Yves in “The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn” has Moroccan heritage, and his French name (like Yves St. Laurent, the designer!) reflects that.
And when people who haven’t read more than the description of For Darkness Shows the Stars ridicule the name choices, I shrug again. For not only are the names in that book nods to the source material of Persuasion (Elliot North = Anne Elliot and Captain Malakai Wentforth = Captain Frederick Wentworth), they also possess meaning within the book itself. I never pick names in a vacuum, and the names in this book are possibly more meaningful than any names I’ve ever chosen, for reasons that become clear to the reader as they read.
What’s really unusual about the names, perhaps, is how normal they actually are. The book takes places hundreds and hundreds of years in the future. The names we use today are not necessarily similar to the names of seven hundred years ago. That they are so similar to names used today speaks more to the makeup of my futuristic society — they’re a very backwards-facing, tradition-oriented society, and thus you’ll see names that sound familiar, and even old-fashioned to us: things like Victoria, Benedict, Tatiana, Olivia, and Horatio.
If the names aren’t realistic to the ones you’d hear today — well, good. I didn’t intend them to be.
(Continued tomorrow, in part two. Meanwhile, thank you baby name bloggers. You make my job so much more fun.)
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