American Language Supplement 2 (101 page)

There remains the large group that defies analysis and even classification. All that one may say of its masterpieces is that they show a resolute determination to achieve something hitherto unmatched and unimagined, at whatever cost to tradition and decorum. It is as if the ambitious mother of a newly-hatched darling wrote all the elements of all the ancient girls’ names upon slips of paper, added slips bearing syllables filched from the terminology of all the arts and sciences, heaved the whole into an electric salad-tosser, and then arranged the seethed contents two by two or three by three. On what other theory is one to arrive at the genesis of such prodigies as
Flouzelle, Glitha, Lephair, Ulestine, Delector, Luvader, Wheirmelda, Gentervee, Margileth
and
Moonean?
They bear no apparent relation to the ordinary nomenclature of the language, but seem to be altogether synthetic. It is easy to imagine the exultation of a poor woman who achieves so shining a novelty. She not only marks off her little darling from all other little darlings within ear- or rumor-shot; she also establishes herself in her community as a salient social reformer and forward-looker and is quickly rewarded with the envy and imitation of other mothers. In the heat of this creative urge, alas, she sometimes contrives something that may wring snickers from city slickers,
e.g., Faucette, Vomera, Uretha, Melassia, Fondanell, Onema, Leyette, Glanda, Morene, Phalla, Ova, Merdine, Eutris, Gelda, Tryphena
or
Coita
, but her friends and admirers are unaware of any cryptic meaning or suggestion, and so is she herself.
¹
These are names wholly new to the human record, and she thinks that they are pretty ones, and even gorgeous. The woman next door who, in revolt against the stereotyped, can fetch up nothing better than
Echo, Fairy, Dreamy, Kewpie, Kiwanis, Dewdrop or Apple
is plainly of an inferior order of advanced thinker.

Most such inventions, I gather from the documents, come from mothers in the lower income brackets, but by no means all. Some of the most extraordinary specimens on my list are taken, not from the police news in the Bible Belt newspapers, but from rosters of
college students and the elegant gossip of the society columns. Indeed, the impulse to make strange names for their daughters sometimes seizes upon women on the highest cultural levels, and as a result not a few female Americans of considerable dignity bear them. In AL4
¹
I made note of a lady professor in California named
Eschscholtzia
– whether in honor of the California poppy or of the Russian naturalist who was its eponym I do not know.
Irita
, the charming given-name of the charming woman who is editor of the New York
Herald Tribune’s Books
, was concocted, according to her own account, “with no excuse except that it pleased my parents’ fancy.”
²
Tallulah
, the name of a very successful actress, is geographical and has been borne by ladies of her family, the Bank-heads of Alabama, for several generations. The four daughters of the late Owen Cattell, one of the editors of
Science
, are
Coryl, Roma, Quinta
and
Jayjay
.
³
Miss M.
Burneice
Larson, director of the Medical Bureau in Chicago, finds her name so spelled because her mother objected to the way that
Bernice
was pronounced by the Cornish miners of the Michigan copper country where she was born, to wit,
Búrniss
, and determined to do something about it.
⁴

I have noted the frequency of strange given-names among lady professors, especially in the South; the same frequency seems to prevail among librarians. One named
Ullainee
is reported from Illinois, and others named
Vannelda, Zola Mae, Azaleen
and
Mirth
have been found below the Potomac. Still another lady of the craft,
Tommie
by name, is said to have once suffered the embarrassment of being booked to share a room with a he-colleague at a professional convention. In Canada there is a female public official, now retired, whose given names are the simple initials,
O P
. In Oklahoma there is a female pianist named
James
.
⁵
In 1940, writing in the
Reader’s Digest
upon the strange names borne by some of the wives of Southern congressmen,
e.g., Clarine, Ivo
,
⁶
Nobie, Merle
and
Lady
Bird
, I fell into the error of including
Ocllo
, and was politely called to book by its bearer, Mrs.
Ocllo
Gunn Boykin, wife of a representative from Alabama. It is not, in fact, a given-name of native manufacture, though it is unusual: it is that of the sister and consort of Cachi, one of the legendary founders of the Inca dynasty of Peru, and was bestowed upon Mrs. Boykin because of her grandfather’s admiration for that dynasty.

When the invention and adoption of such names began I do not know, but it must have been long ago. Sydney Smith gave the name of
Saba
to his eldest daughter, born
c
. 1800, in an effort to find something striking enough to divert attention from
Smith
.
¹
Belva
Lockwood, born in 1830, was the first woman admitted to practise before the Supreme Court of the United States, and ran for the Presidency on the Equal Rights ticket in 1884 and 1888; she is one of the saints of the feminist calendar, and many admirers of her generation named their girl babies after her. General George E. Pickett’s second wife was baptized
LaSalle
, and General Richard S. Ewell’s had the name of
Lizinka
.
²
Cornelius Vanderbilt II, in 1869, married as his second wife, a lady of Mobile, Ala., named
Frank
Crawford.
Lamiza
has come to its fifth generation in the Breckenridge family, and has been borrowed outside.
³
It appeared in the New York Social Register for 1933–34 along with the following:

The process of forming such names, on a level far above that of the unlettered, was described by the Oklahoma City
Times
some
years ago in an article dealing with the five beautiful daughters of a Mrs. Arthur Wilbur White of that city, to wit,
Wilbarine, Yerdith, Norvetta, Marlynne
and
Arthetta
. A group photograph of them was included, and under it one of the bright young men of the
Times
wrote “not a trite name in the bunch.” I quote:

That the fashion for artificial names may be spreading is indicated by the fact that they have begun to be listed in the handbooks for puzzled parents got out by enterprising publishers. In one of these books, for example, I find
Adabel, Arvia, Cerelia, Rosel, Sidra, Thadine
and
Xylia
,
³
and in another
Airlia, Darlene, Gelda, Marette, Xanthe
and
Zella
.
⁴
But even in the heart of the Swell Names Zone the older girls’ names have not yet gone wholly underground, and elsewhere they hold out stoutly. I turn, for example, to a list of 346 recent graduates of the Capitol City High-school of Oklahoma City, about equally divided between girls and boys. Among the former, despite the throng of
Frenas, Phillie Joes, Narasonas
and
Twylas
, I yet find two
Katherines
and
Helens
, three
Margarets
and
Dorothys
,
four
Ruths
, nine
Marys
and no less than seventeen
Bettys
. These old names have been facing the competition of successive waves of newer ones for centuries, but they still hold out. Ernest Weekly once undertook an examination of the names of women dead before
c
. 1750, embalmed in the Dictionary of National Biography: he found that
Agnes, Alice, Cicely, Joan, Matilda
(or
Maud
),
Margaret, Elizabeth
and the related
Isabel
“recur almost monotonously” – and all of them continue to flourish to this day.
¹
There are recurrent crazes for naming girls after the heroines of novels and movies and the stars of stage and screen, but they do not last. The old names go into disuse for a while, and then come back triumphantly. “The only thing that has kept girls’ names from collapsing into sheer frivolity or worse,” wrote a Canadian observer in 1935, “has been the astonishing recrudescence of
Ann
and
Jane
.”
²
Both have flourished with occasional short eclipses, since the Fourteenth Century. So have
Amy, Beatrice, Blanche, Mary, Philippa, Helen, Emma, Katherine
and
Sibyl
. Dr. Morris Fishbein reported in 1944
³
that one-twenty-fourth of all American women were then named
Mary
, with
Elizabeth, Margaret
and
Helen
following in order. He added, however that
Mary
was apparently receding somewhat, with
Elizabeth
threatening to run ahead of it, and
Helen, Dorothy, Margaret, Marie, Katherine, Louise, Ruth
and
Eleanor
following.

“The names of women,” says the Manu-smriti, the ancient Brahman code of laws, “should be easy to pronounce, not implying anything dreadful, possess a plain meaning, be pleasing and auspicious, end in long vowels, and contain a word of benediction.”
⁴
“Let no man,” it continues in another place, “marry a woman named after a constellation, a tree or a river, nor one bearing the name of a low caste, or of a mountain, nor one named after a bird, a snake or a slave, nor one whose name inspires terror.” Later sages have offered more specific advice. Coleridge declared that every woman’s name should be a trochee – that is, of two syllables, with the accent on the first,
e.g., Mary, Alice, Agnes, Ellen
. But Gelett Burgess has
complained that the trochee suggests “a persistent, hammering force,” and that the iambus, in which the accent is on the second syllable,
e.g., Elaine, Jeannette, Louise
, suggests “a decisive vigor.” His choice seems to be the dactyl – an accented syllable followed by two without accents,
e.g., Emily, Adelaide, Abigail, Isabel
—, though he also has a kind word for the anapest – three syllables, with the accent on the last,
e.g., Antoinette, Marianne
. The former, he says, shows “limp, ragdoll ease” and the latter “is just the thing for sparkle and pep.”
¹
Another recent professor of the subject, Elsdon C. Smith, contents himself with advocating names embodying “the more sonorous consonants,
r, l, m
and
n
, and next to these
t, p
and
d
.” He warns against
q
and the hard
g
, but says that “the soft
e
is pretty, as in
Evelyn
.” A good girls’ name, he concludes, should be easily spelled and pronounced, it should not give ready birth to a disagreeable diminutive, it should be free from unpleasant connotations or associations, and it should not be “so odd or unusual as to evoke constant comment.”
²
But I greatly fear that the principal and often only excuse for some of the grotesque names I have listed is precisely that they “evoke constant comment.”

Two fashions in boys’ names have been mentioned – that for diminutives
³
and that for mere initials. A third of almost equal oddity converts
Junior
from an indicator following the surname into a middle-name,
e.g
., John
Junior
Jones. In a list of 88 students, male and female, graduated from the Marshall, Mo., High-School in the class of 1946 I find no less than three boys thus named, and in a roster of Army recruits from the same town I find two more. One of the Marshall
Juniors
applied to the local Circuit Court in 1946 for permission to drop his middle name on the ground that it had “caused him difficulty and confusion.”
⁴
Even when the adjective is in its proper place it is common for an American boy to be called
Junior
by his family and friends, to distinguish him from his father. In writing,
Jr
. is in most frequent use in the United States, but in England
Jun
. seems to be preferred.