“Giving a name,” Thomas Carlyle once said, “is a poetic
art.” Perhaps, but it can also be a trying one. Item: Retreating
before the distemper of feminists who do not like all hurricanes to
bear women's names, Government meteorologists this year will christen
storms not only Aletta but Bud and Daniel and Fico. Item: A national
chain, Sambo's Restaurants, has run into stern resistance in New
England, where civil rights groups are trying to ban the name because
of allegedly racist overtones. Item: A young man who asked a Minnesota
court to change his name to “1069” was recently refused and
rebuked by the judge for proposing “an offense to human
dignity” and seeking a name that was “inherently
totalitarian.” Strong language. Strong feelings and forensics to match are commonplace when names are at
stake—and they seem to be at stake all the time and all over the place
in the U.S. The necessity of naming 3 million babies a year is only one
source of nameless stress. Americans continually leap into flaps and furors
over the naming and renaming of things and places. It amounts to a national
obsession, or craze, or fascination, or mania—name it what you will—and
it seems to be getting livelier all the time. The name game is also growing ever more trendy and even desperate as
more and more people clamor for attention in a please-notice-me
society. It is merely ironic that businesses with names like the No
Name Bar and The Chocolate Soup now so
proliferate that only an innocent would suffer a double take on
learning that an orchestra called The Widespread Depression happened to
be performing last week at a nightspot called The Other End. That is in
Greenwich Village, where some runners trade at a store called The
Athlete's Foot. It is not easy to diagnose such nominal absurdity, but plainly it is
epidemic. Already the name thing has inspired the publication of whole
books that purport to plumb the “psychological vibrations” of
personal names. Dawn and Loretta and Candy are supposed to be sexy,
according to Christopher Andersen's The Name Game, and Bart and Mac and
Nate are macho. Humphrey is sedentary; so much for Bogart. Anyway
Americans have not needed any tracts or theories to get them lunging
after catchy handles. One Phoenix mother recently branded her new baby
girl with the unforgettable sobriquet Equal Rights Amendment. The game is ubiquitous. Corporations strain to invent short, arcane
names. Married women have begun to resist taking their husbands'
surnames. Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali in midcareer. Sambo is a
target of only one minority; Italians hate the name Mafia. Rock groups,
such as Jefferson Starship and the Grateful Dead, have
stretched the art of naming to surreal heights and depths. The
President's wish to stick to Jimmy as his official name perhaps
ingratiated him more with the public than any other step he has
taken—and may, in the end, have hinted more than he intended at his
fuzzy grasp of presidential power.
