Names are an important key to what a society values. Anthropologists recognize naming as 'one of the chief methods for imposing order on perception.'8/5/04
.......--David S. Slawson
Because she disliked the name Louise nearly as much as she disliked her mother, with whom she shared it, Mémé always went by Germaine.
'Mémé' is an affectionate name to call one's grandmother --short, I assume, for memère. Papa, of course, never called her that; he had a humorous way of entitling her Madame duNavet. What's funny about that is that navet, which is only one letter removed from our surname, means 'turnip' in French. Added to that, the prefix 'du' denotes nobility. So with his joke Papa managed to comment in an economical and witty way upon our family's humble proletarian rutabagas.
A friend of mine likes to make a similar, though less clever, play on my name. I'm not entirely clear what the point of it is, and I wouldn't necessarily characterize my response as encouragement, but in the end I don't find it worth the trouble to make an issue over something that she apparently finds so amusing.
That doesn't mean that I'm oblivious to the power of framing a thing or a person with a name. As Derrida reflected, "monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say, 'here are our monsters' without immediately turning the monsters into pets." Not only does naming (or nicknaming) a thing tame it by conferring a type of ownership and relational power differential, it may also substitute a new identity for an old one (which can be a good thing or a bad one, depending), as is common knowledge among middle schoolers, gang bangers, and our great nation's president. Perhaps it may bestow a sense of intimacy and belonging upon the namee as well (though come to think of it, that supposition might not hold true if the namee's nickname is, for instance, "Breck Girl" or "Pootie Poo"). In any case, among friends a certain type of connection may be shared when they take turns good-naturedly naming one another.
Still, while a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, there's a good chance that it will be perceived differently because of its name. (Beauty, after all, is in the nose of the beholder, not in the scent of the rose itself.) 25 years ago when taste tests and challenges were the advertising rage, researchers discovered that blind taste tests stimulated the right side of the brain and yielded one set of results, while brand-revealed tastings stimulated a different part of the brain and generated an entirely different set of results. And their conclusion: the name's the thing. Name-brand association exhibited a marked ability to override taste-based perception.
I believe cold war politics led my first grade teacher to experience a distastefully foreign feel in her mouth when she spoke my name. Imagine the verbal equivalent of holding a name disdainfully, with wrinkled nose, at arm's length as if it emitted a foul odor: in those name-brand, white bread days of Dick and Jane she could only bring herself to go so far as grudgingly calling me what I thought of as a Kraft Cheez sort of version of my name. When I corrected her pronunciation, she fixed her gaze upon me, squinched her eyes, and informed me icily that my name was too hard to pronounce and I was henceforth to be known as 'Jackie.' Ack! Acky! Icky! I endured my detestable new name and self image throughout the school year, but the following September I announced that I preferred to be called by my middle name, Marie, which I privately supposed any idiot could pronounce. To go with the name I simulated a new persona, during school hours anyway: la petite chou-chou française. I maintained the act for the rest of that year, but came away from the experience with a clear understanding that appearances are generally a lot more trouble than they're worth. By third grade I had more than resigned myself to being a Jackie, though to this day (despite the fact that I have known many wonderful people named Jackie) I cannot utter that name without an inward curling of the toes.
At any rate, the story goes that my parents named me after a French actrice, whose surname and biographical data have always eluded me, but whom I cannot imagine as having been other than glamorous, intelligent, and sophisticated. I felt that, like her, I was a celebrity of sorts to cousins, aunts, and uncles on the other side of the ocean. From earliest memory, I had an awareness (heavily filtered, to be sure, through my grandmother, who loved me very much) of the firstborn and much acclaimed 'Jacqueline' being a type of brand item, a household name to relations with whom I, Jacqueline, had no way of communicating otherwise. They hadn't any idea who I was (nor I they) but so far as I knew they nonetheless doted on me from afar in a kindly way as the somewhat exotic cousine americaine, while here on solid American soil the quotidian story line I constructed from snippets and bits of others' dramas cast me as the cause of my parents' lost dreams and economic privation. Had our far-flung relations somehow known that my father (alternately dubbed Jeannot and le moinneau, or sparrow, by his parents) called me 'Meathead' (sometimes sharpened to a fine skewer point when shortened with mock affection to 'Meats') and 'Jackass' (a play on my mother's shortening of my name to Jac), how could they have thought them other than terms of endearment?
In his famous essay titled "Borges and I," the author toyed with the idea of his identity shifting between the celebrity and the private individual, both of whom shared the same name, admitting his uncertainty as to where one ended and the other began. "I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary," he wrote. But the private self is subsumed by the public, which is a mere fiction. "Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things… I do not know which of us has written this page." The theme of nonexistent identity recurred continually in his work, with language portrayed as a primary force that fabricated not only people, but worlds.
Several years ago I heard a radio interview in which the interviewee described the power of portrayal, noting that the middle and working classes have become accustomed to seeing themselves through the eyes of those who hate them, blindly consuming and voting against their own self interests. He identified a need for internal self reliance, pointing out that we must gain a conscious awareness of our selves and learn to articulate our collective needs, which include opportunity and education for all, as opposed to a few who happen to be identified as "stars." Expanding that idea, he specifically highlighted the fact that "there are thousands of Michael Jacksons and Whitney Houstons in every community." But to know ourselves, he said, we must be aware of our history, and because they carry both history and identity, shaping and affirming who we are in front of the mirror, names are an important part of that process of awareness.
I once read in a book the history of an Italian named Novi who, having fallen from papal grace sometime around the turn of the 16th century, found it necessary to beat a sudden and extremely rapid retreat from the long arm of the Church. He was last seen galloping westward on horseback across the Alps. My dad's cousin Hervé, the family genealogist, tells a corresponding tale about our earliest known ancestor, who rode on on a very lathered, weary horse into a small village in Savoie at roughly the same time, identified himself as Novet and donated money to the church in order to claim standing in the community. I visited Savoie with Hervé in 1980. We passed through several villages and combed through cemeteries, finding headstones inscribed with the names Novet, Clery, Combaz, Bouvier--our people. When I told the story of Novi, Hervé emphatically and indignantly rejected the merest whiff of a suggestion that those two men could be one and the same.
"Un italien?" he exploded. "Jamais!!" End of story.
'Mémé' is an affectionate name to call one's grandmother --short, I assume, for memère. Papa, of course, never called her that; he had a humorous way of entitling her Madame duNavet. What's funny about that is that navet, which is only one letter removed from our surname, means 'turnip' in French. Added to that, the prefix 'du' denotes nobility. So with his joke Papa managed to comment in an economical and witty way upon our family's humble proletarian rutabagas.
(Thanks to moonmilk.com for the gorgeous image!)
A friend of mine likes to make a similar, though less clever, play on my name. I'm not entirely clear what the point of it is, and I wouldn't necessarily characterize my response as encouragement, but in the end I don't find it worth the trouble to make an issue over something that she apparently finds so amusing.
That doesn't mean that I'm oblivious to the power of framing a thing or a person with a name. As Derrida reflected, "monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say, 'here are our monsters' without immediately turning the monsters into pets." Not only does naming (or nicknaming) a thing tame it by conferring a type of ownership and relational power differential, it may also substitute a new identity for an old one (which can be a good thing or a bad one, depending), as is common knowledge among middle schoolers, gang bangers, and our great nation's president. Perhaps it may bestow a sense of intimacy and belonging upon the namee as well (though come to think of it, that supposition might not hold true if the namee's nickname is, for instance, "Breck Girl" or "Pootie Poo"). In any case, among friends a certain type of connection may be shared when they take turns good-naturedly naming one another.
Still, while a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, there's a good chance that it will be perceived differently because of its name. (Beauty, after all, is in the nose of the beholder, not in the scent of the rose itself.) 25 years ago when taste tests and challenges were the advertising rage, researchers discovered that blind taste tests stimulated the right side of the brain and yielded one set of results, while brand-revealed tastings stimulated a different part of the brain and generated an entirely different set of results. And their conclusion: the name's the thing. Name-brand association exhibited a marked ability to override taste-based perception.
I believe cold war politics led my first grade teacher to experience a distastefully foreign feel in her mouth when she spoke my name. Imagine the verbal equivalent of holding a name disdainfully, with wrinkled nose, at arm's length as if it emitted a foul odor: in those name-brand, white bread days of Dick and Jane she could only bring herself to go so far as grudgingly calling me what I thought of as a Kraft Cheez sort of version of my name. When I corrected her pronunciation, she fixed her gaze upon me, squinched her eyes, and informed me icily that my name was too hard to pronounce and I was henceforth to be known as 'Jackie.' Ack! Acky! Icky! I endured my detestable new name and self image throughout the school year, but the following September I announced that I preferred to be called by my middle name, Marie, which I privately supposed any idiot could pronounce. To go with the name I simulated a new persona, during school hours anyway: la petite chou-chou française. I maintained the act for the rest of that year, but came away from the experience with a clear understanding that appearances are generally a lot more trouble than they're worth. By third grade I had more than resigned myself to being a Jackie, though to this day (despite the fact that I have known many wonderful people named Jackie) I cannot utter that name without an inward curling of the toes.
At any rate, the story goes that my parents named me after a French actrice, whose surname and biographical data have always eluded me, but whom I cannot imagine as having been other than glamorous, intelligent, and sophisticated. I felt that, like her, I was a celebrity of sorts to cousins, aunts, and uncles on the other side of the ocean. From earliest memory, I had an awareness (heavily filtered, to be sure, through my grandmother, who loved me very much) of the firstborn and much acclaimed 'Jacqueline' being a type of brand item, a household name to relations with whom I, Jacqueline, had no way of communicating otherwise. They hadn't any idea who I was (nor I they) but so far as I knew they nonetheless doted on me from afar in a kindly way as the somewhat exotic cousine americaine, while here on solid American soil the quotidian story line I constructed from snippets and bits of others' dramas cast me as the cause of my parents' lost dreams and economic privation. Had our far-flung relations somehow known that my father (alternately dubbed Jeannot and le moinneau, or sparrow, by his parents) called me 'Meathead' (sometimes sharpened to a fine skewer point when shortened with mock affection to 'Meats') and 'Jackass' (a play on my mother's shortening of my name to Jac), how could they have thought them other than terms of endearment?
In his famous essay titled "Borges and I," the author toyed with the idea of his identity shifting between the celebrity and the private individual, both of whom shared the same name, admitting his uncertainty as to where one ended and the other began. "I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary," he wrote. But the private self is subsumed by the public, which is a mere fiction. "Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things… I do not know which of us has written this page." The theme of nonexistent identity recurred continually in his work, with language portrayed as a primary force that fabricated not only people, but worlds.
Several years ago I heard a radio interview in which the interviewee described the power of portrayal, noting that the middle and working classes have become accustomed to seeing themselves through the eyes of those who hate them, blindly consuming and voting against their own self interests. He identified a need for internal self reliance, pointing out that we must gain a conscious awareness of our selves and learn to articulate our collective needs, which include opportunity and education for all, as opposed to a few who happen to be identified as "stars." Expanding that idea, he specifically highlighted the fact that "there are thousands of Michael Jacksons and Whitney Houstons in every community." But to know ourselves, he said, we must be aware of our history, and because they carry both history and identity, shaping and affirming who we are in front of the mirror, names are an important part of that process of awareness.
. . : : : : . .
I once read in a book the history of an Italian named Novi who, having fallen from papal grace sometime around the turn of the 16th century, found it necessary to beat a sudden and extremely rapid retreat from the long arm of the Church. He was last seen galloping westward on horseback across the Alps. My dad's cousin Hervé, the family genealogist, tells a corresponding tale about our earliest known ancestor, who rode on on a very lathered, weary horse into a small village in Savoie at roughly the same time, identified himself as Novet and donated money to the church in order to claim standing in the community. I visited Savoie with Hervé in 1980. We passed through several villages and combed through cemeteries, finding headstones inscribed with the names Novet, Clery, Combaz, Bouvier--our people. When I told the story of Novi, Hervé emphatically and indignantly rejected the merest whiff of a suggestion that those two men could be one and the same.
"Un italien?" he exploded. "Jamais!!" End of story.
