Names

Big Frank has been thinking lately about how lucky he is that he is Big Frank rather than Fig Bank not that there is anything wrong with figs, but a bank full of them would be much too sweet for even Big Frank to deal with. It’s funny about the names that we get saddled with as babies. Most of us just grow into them without a second thought. However, take a second to think about what it is that you would name yourself if you could – or if you had to. We become so accustomed to our own names that it is as difficult to think of ourselves with a different one as it would be to put on a different face. Our name is part of our assumed identity, and it is a recognized right (the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child identifies the right to have one’s own name as one such right).

Your name is a sign of you – it represents you, and is one of the first such outer representation that you point to as you: “Hi, I’m Big Frank.” (I’m hanging my identity on those sounds – those letters.) Your name when uttered by others is their acknowledgement of you, and it pleases you to hear yourself greeted with that word that means you; it massages your ego and boosts your self-esteem. The absolute minimum benchmark for knowing someone is to know their name. If you don’t know that you have no claim to knowing them. Conversely, you call someone by another’s name at the risk of alienation; and the more intimate you are, the more lasting the damage if you use the wrong name – under some circumstances it can’t be taken back (see Don Paterson’s poem on this – The Gift).

What happens when you change your name? Well few people change their given names, but women often take their husband’s names when they marry. How does it feel to shed one name and take on another? Philip Larkin has a poem on just this topic – his view of what happens to the abandoned name.

Maiden Name

Marrying left your maiden name disused.
Its five light sounds no longer mean your face,
Your voice, and all your variants of grace;
For since you were so thankfully confused
By law with someone else, you cannot be
Semantically the same as that young beauty:
It was of her that these two words were used.

Now it's a phrase applicable to no one,
Lying just where you left it,scattered through
Old lists, old programmes, a school prize or two
Packets of letters tied with tartan ribbon -
Then is it scentless, weightless, strengthless, wholly
Untruthful? Try whispering it slowly.
No, it means you. Or, since you're past and gone,

It means what we feel now about you then:
How beautiful you were, and near, and young,
So vivid, you might still be there among
Those first few days, unfingermarked again.
So your old name shelters our faithfulness,
Instead of losing shape and meaning less
With your depreciating luggage laden.

---- Philip Larkin