Toads in the Hole

Names that Survive

As Kaylene said in a comment at chez Briscoe the other day, one of the best things about being pregnant is playing the name game. At any given restful moment, my mind can wander over to the tottering stack of names we’ve collected, sort through them, add to them, organize them into teams, make them fight… which becomes a different kind of daydream altogether. But there is real pleasure in playing the name game solo, dual, or with a whole group. Other people have ideas for names I would never think of: relatives named Renata, or the mayor of their town when they were a kid who went by Percy, short for Percival. The downside, as Lisa Briscoe has pointed out, is that everyone knows someone who happens to have an excellent name that also happens to be a total jerk. “Oh, you can’t name your baby that, I grew up with someone named that and in high school it came out that they tortured and ate kittens!”

There are a lot of names that are tainted by history. Everyone knows the baggage with Adolph, Benito, and Pol (Though Stalin hasn’t managed to rub off on Joseph. I wonder if that’s why everyone simply called him Stalin, they didn’t want to associate him with Jesus’ step-dad.). And there are other, excellent names that, while not everyone knows of the connection, careful research reveals a dark origin. A famous example of this is Mary, which is one of the most popular names in the western world and, incidentally, the given name of my mother (who goes by Molly), my grandmother (who goes by Mare), and my mother-in-law, (who goes by Mary). The thing is, Mary is derived from the Hebrew Miriam meaning “sea of bitterness and sorrow.” With that in mind, I’m less judgmental about people thinking that Odious is a fine thing to call a boy.

In this spirit, the other afternoon after microbiology class, some of my classmates and I came up with a short list of medical terms that, although they had some unpleasant connections, would make fine names for EthelRed:

Eschar (pronounced either e-shar or es-kar) is a fine place to start. I think Eschar would make a fine name for a boy or a girl, although you could easily feminize it into Eschara if you wanted to, and you weren’t turned off by the fact that an eschar is the technical term for a “thick, coagulated crust or slough which develops following a thermal burn”, derived from the Greek eschara for fireplace.

Yersinia has a nice floral ring to it, the kind of name I wouldn’t mind seeing appellated to a cheerful blonde girl. Of course, Yersinia pestis is the bacillus that causes plague, responsible for the death of a fourth of Europe in the 14th century (The Black Death) and a 100,000,000 deaths in the sixth through the eighth centuries (The Plague of Justinian).

In a similar vein is Shigella, an alternative to the very popular Shakira and Michaela/Mikayla, which, of course, is the bacteria that causes dysentery.

To get into the territory famously charted by Roald Dahl when he named a girl in a story Verruca (a viral wart), we have Tophi, perhaps a jauntier form of Topher (which Aimee tells me is short for Christopher), which are collections of urate crystals in the joints, the Achilles tendon, and, oddly, the ear. Tophi, of course, comes with long-term gout.

Perhaps we should leave it at that. There are, no doubt, many more examples of pleasing and mellifluous words that just happen to have dismaying ties to human suffering. But by taking a term of reproachment and making it one of endearment we demonstrate that human ability to make lemons into lemonade. Of course, it is an expectant parent’s great responsibility to choose a name that will be something to live up to, or perhaps just to survive. So if EthelRed’s a girl, maybe Yersinia will make the cut. If a boy, maybe we’ll just go with Sue.

Posted by Joel at October 8, 2005 05:08 PM