Fragments

Human beings are more entertaining, informative and unpredictable than anything else yet discovered in our solar system. Even the internet. That is why I become frustrated with always having to use boring names when I refer to these beings. To my ear, names like Bob or Joe or Jane or Sue are the verbal equivalent of watching a grocery store truck unload. They simply do not do justice to the regal and befuddling objects to which they are affixed.

As the “Christian church” attempts to retain some of its eroding influence in society, it is probably not helped by the fact that these dreary labels are called “Christian names.” Why in fact are they so called? Does it have anything to do with the way Jesus was always renaming everybody? Why did he do that? I’m just asking. Saul got renamed Paul, Cephas became Peter, Levi ended up as Matthew. I hate to say it, but every one of these is a change from a name with some meat on it to a name that sounds the way kale tastes. This is not good PR.

I’m as happy as anybody that… um … whatever “we” were way back when … won the Cold War. But those reds had it all over us in the first name department: Vladimir, Helga, Igor. What’s wrong with the following sentence?: “Yaah, my cumrad, let us consume gahlloons of wodka, incite rewolush, and carry buxom women back to our tents. What do you say, Bob?” Get the point? There may be an American flag on the moon, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was put there by two guys named Neil and Ed.

Like many of our social problems, I think this one may have something to do with juvenile delinquents. Remember how grade school bullies would always make fun of everybody who had an interesting name? Guys named Gordon Lord Byron, Igor Stravinsky, Horace Walpole or Humphrey Bogart would come home from school sobbing, and when they got a little addition to the family, Mommy and Daddy would have learned their lesson. “Hey, Jupiter, say hello to your new brother, Roy.”

Our forever-cutting-edge television writers have evidently been aware of this problem for a long time. The ancient TV show “The Waltons” gave its characters two boring names: Jim Bob, John Boy, Sue Bob, Corn Grit, etc. But it didn’t work for two reasons. First, the effect of two boring things together is not increased interest, it’s just two boring things together, like someone earning an an MBA playing shuffleboard. Secondly, in all the history of English-speaking peoples, there was no basis anywhere in objective reality for this two first name scheme. Why didn’t anyone on the show ever question this? Suddenly, sitting out in the mountains of primo Americana in the 1930’s was a family of people who had two first names. With just a little more effort on the part of its writers, “The Waltons” could have been a very clever Sci-Fi satire. The two first name thing would have been your first clue that extra-terrestrials had come to harvest us, and their preliminary research team had just been a little lax about Earth names. Later on in the series, you could see them all sleeping under their beds instead of on them, and still later, old Doc and the wimp who owned the mercantile could stumble across a flying saucer in the hay barn.

In the 80’s and 90’s, certain Southern California Former Yuppies Now Parents (FYNP’s) tried to solve the problem by giving their children trendy names like Justin, Jenelle, Jason and Jamie. Now that those kids are older, we can see this was at best a mere pseudo-revolution. First of all, 90% of these names begin with the letter J, which is pathetically conformist AND boring. Secondly, there’s just something in these names that calls to mind 12-dollar lattes, leveraging (whatever that was back then) , pasta salads, and driving a green Lexus.

To solve the boring name problem, I hereby issue a call to all prospective parents. Don’t just buy one of those little first name books that sit next to the National Inquirer at the grocery store (Mark Your Baby for Life!). If we all start applying our imaginations at the same time, nobody will be treated like a freak.

Here are some guidelines: Adolph is out because of the Nazis and the meat tenderizer. Rudolph is out because of the Nazis and the reindeer. (One more good reason to hate the Nazis: Interesting Name Trashing — INT.) Other names which are not boring but which should not be considered for other reasons are: Darth Vader, Tarzan, Idi, and God. Which reminds me of how much a name influences how someone gets treated. What if God were named, say, Roscoe? How might that turn out?

People used to be named after the major Christian virtues such as Faith, Hope and Charity. I think it’s a good tradition, but those particular virtues hardly stir the passions anymore. How about Tolerance? Or, Worth Billions? Free Thinker, Highly Evolved, Gotnee Change? Or if you aren’t that ambitious for your offspring, why not Table Manners, or Pottie Trained? No more Ozzies, please.

The American Indians are as colorful and profound as anyone can be in this area, with the likes of Running Deer or Sitting Bull. How about a contemporary continuation of this tradition: Sizzling Bacon, or Eyes-From-Too-Much-Computer?

Here are some miscellaneous possibilities that seem to bubble up from my piece of the collective unconscious: Sigmar, Gergatron, Huge, Tasmania, Luminous, Unique.. Or names that sound like sophisticated initials: Aybee, Arjay, Beebee. DeeEmZee. That’s a good one.

Of course a lot of these sound like nicknames. But that’s exactly the point. Maybe we give nicknames as a result of humanity’s natural tendency to spice up dreary things. If someone really was named Pottie Trained, we might call him or her “Pot” for short, but what would be the point? Nobody refers to Saskatchewan as “Sassy”, or to the Hundred Years War as the “Hunny”. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Salamander Kardashian always got called by their full names. Why? Because no one wants to miss an opportunity to talk that way.

I think if our real names were more interesting, most of us would have better self-images and get invited to parties more often. Then we would stop burdening ourselves with global problems which are so enormous that they make us overly nervous so that we forget to be considerate of our neighbor. Of course, there is also the possibility that I am completely wrong on this point and that boring names provide a major calming influence, like soft music, Prozac and Utah. In any case, the subject needs a little more attention than it gets, from psychologists and social scientists especially. Look elsewhere for my poems about names determining destiny.