Every so often a bolt of
panic strikes me when I consider what my wife and I named our children. Our daughter has the shortest name on record: E. Our son, meanwhile, reportedly has the longest in New York City: Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles (sung to the tune of "John Jacob Jingle Heimer Schmitt"). The original intent of "E" was that she could decide what it stood for. She was born about two months early, and we almost called her Early. We also liked a number of other "E" names. So we decided to punt on the whole issue and give her control. (Little did we know the world was about to enter the electronic era: E-Trade, e-commerce, e-everything.) We figured when it came time to rebel against her
parents, she'd choose something very traditional like Elizabeth, or perhaps my mother's name, Ellen. So far, at age 12, she is still E.
Once you name your first kid E, the pressure is on. You can't just name the second one "John" unless you are conducting a controlled experiment on sibling differences. I had wanted to give our boy an ethnically ambiguous name to challenge assumptions about race and assimilation. For all the Asian-American Howards out there, shouldn't there be a light-haired, blue-eyed white kid named Yo Xing (which means shooting star if said in the second tone in Mandarin)? Initially, I had my heart set on Xing-Yo. I liked the initials XY for a boy, mimicking the male chromosomes. And I liked that X-ing also meant "Crossing." But my wife is superstitious and refuses any name that has been suggested before the baby's birth. I opened my big mouth during the pregnancy and blew it. Still, she accepted Yo, appealing for its meaning "I" in Spanish (and confusing in a "who's on first?" sort of way now that Yo is actually studying the language at school). It also means "Hey" or "You" in street parlance.
As for all the other names: We suspected that this was the last kid we would produce, so we wanted to squeeze everything in there without having to make tough choices. We threw in family names, the name of a recently deceased mentor of my wife, and the emperor Augustus (I was into Robert Graves's I, Claudius that hot summer). But Xing was left out until three years later, when my wife finally agreed that my original thought was pretty cool and signed the paperwork to add it. (Her elder daughter, my stepdaughter, is named "Mister Jamba Djang Ulysess Hope." So my ideas were not a difficult sell.)
And yet in light of all of our fun adventures in naming, I often wonder whether we unduly saddled our children with disadvantageous monikers that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
"Do you think I am the only person in the world with the name E?" my daughter asked me on a recent trip back from Mexico. I wondered what the probability was that someone else might have that name somewhere on the globe. Of course, there were plenty of dialects and whole language groups about which I knew nothing. But I decided to take a chance.
"I bet you are the only E in the world."
"Good," she said, swinging her carry-on luggage. "I like having a unique name."
"Why?" I pushed.
"I don't know," she fired back, annoyed this time. "Why did you and Mom think I would choose it to stand for something?"
"I want to be called Sean," 11-year-old Yo piped in from behind. He's a slow walker, especially when carrying anything mildly heavy like his bag. "How do you spell 'Sean,' by the way?" he asked.
"There's lots of ways to spell it," I explained. "Why do you want to change your name? Don't you like being unique? Don't you like that your name made you famous?" A few years ago, Yo had been written up in The New York Times for having legally added two names to his list—Heyno and Knuckles—at the same time I added in Xing. (As a rambunctious three-year-old, I think he had gotten so used to "Hey, no!" being yelled at him that he figured Heyno was his actual name. Or perhaps he just was co-opting the scold and flipping off his parents in the process. Knuckles was the name of my beloved childhood dog about whom Yo and E had heard funny stories. Why my son identified with a dog is something I will let his future therapists figure out....)
An interview with the four-year-old Yo on Anderson Cooper's 360 followed the name change, as did a write-up in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's book Freakonomics. He had been, at the time, very proud that his name was mentioned in one of the best-selling books of our time, even if it was as an example of freakiness (on the part of his parents, of course). But now he was 10 and hitting the self-conscious sensitivity of pre-pubescent boyhood.
"I want to spell it S-h-a-n," he said. "It can be my nickname."
While we can't really do much about the race or genes or social class we bequeath to our beloved offspring, we do have a choice when it comes to names. We all want our children to be well-adjusted and successful in life, and we certainly don't want to screw it up from the start. Besides, is there a word in any language that sounds as sweet to us as our own first name? Infants less than a year old—possibly even just five months—display the "cocktail party" effect. That is, they perk up and can pick out the sound of their own name even in a room of competing conversations. Some researchers have suggested that we are attracted to others with our names or ones similar to ours. We may even be more likely to move to a city that shares a syllable or two with our given name.
Tags:
ambiguous name,
assimilation,
big mouth,
chromosomes,
controlled experiment,
e trade,
eisner,
first kid,
heimer,
howards,
initials,
john jacob jingle,
mandarin,
original intent,
parlance,
shooting star,
sibling,
tough choices,
weiser,
white kid
