What’s in a Name?

Carolyn J. Rose

 

Before the pandemic and lockdown, I dragged myself from bed several days a week to sub at a local high school. Some days it was a cakewalk. Some days it was a challenge. But every day it was interesting. And every day I looked forward to reading the roll sheets, reading names that I doubt would have appeared on roll sheets when I hit high school at the start of the 60s, names that perhaps didn’t exist then, had yet to be imagined.

 

I once jokingly told a student that I was born shortly after World War II at a time when people were still so exhausted by fear and loss and sacrifice they didn’t have the energy to make up fresh names for their children. I was named for my mother’s college friends. Growing up, I wished for a different label. I thought of my name as a box, a burden. Was I expected to “take after” these women I met only a few times? Would their names shape me? If I had another name, would that alter the trajectory of my life?

 

I imagined the life of a girl named Robin or Amy, Wendy or April. I imagined “lighter” and “less serious” names for myself. I wondered about the process of officially changing my name. I’m sure I mentioned that to my mother. I can’t recall her reaction, but I’m guessing she told me when I was old enough I could do that. In the meantime, there were nicknames. My mother, in fact, often called me Petunia and, oddly, Bedelia.

 

My brothers got relative’s names. The second brother, however, born a decade after the war, didn’t get an exact match to the name, or the usual spelling of a variation. Despite the raised eyebrows of at least one relative, things were changing. My aunts took flights of fancy, leaving out traditional letters or making substitutions when naming my cousins.

 

But, compared to some of the names crafted today, that was nothing.

 

Still, if you ask the Internet to reveal the most popular names, you’ll see many you’ve seen before, classics, names drawn from literature and history, names with meanings rooted deep in the past. Many of those names appeared on the roll sheets I’d review as I raced from the school’s attendance office to my first class. But my eyes were always drawn to the juxtaposition of vowels and consonants that broke with tradition.

 

I never changed my name. By the time I was old enough to tackle the legal process, it no longer seemed important. As Shakespeare (if that, indeed, was his name) wrote, “A rose by any other name . . .”