Okay, maybe it's just me. If it is, go ahead and tell me. I can take it.Why don't people give their children actual names for names anymore?
My father had this game he would play with the grandchildren when they were little, on the first day of school or shortly thereafter. He would say, So tell me about the other children in your class.
"Is there someone named ... Mary?" Shake of the head.
"Uhh ... Edward?" Shake of the head, with a giggle.
"Hmm ... Clinton?" The laughter would begin.
And so on. Clearly, he went to school with a lot of Marys back in the twenties, and I know that Clinton was a big name too; his best friend was named Clinton and there were others. But he would ask for Williams, and Johns, and Susans, and a whole lot of very standard names, and the children would laugh, because there were none. Here in Bizarro Town, my kids and my sister's went to school with a whole mess of Igors and Gennadys and Adis and Gals, because we are Moscow West by way of Haifa, but that's beside the point. There were also a whole lot of Christophers and Katies.
Now, he wouldn't stand a chance. Too many people just make things up, as if the sound that comes out of their throats while they're in labor sounds cool and so they should call their kid that forever. Or they draw a batch of Scrabble tiles out of the bag, I don't know. But the Name Game is past the point where it can be played.
I was just reading the local paper, and there was an article about a family in a nearby town with a little girl named Arriss. You see it on the news all the time when they interview people who witnessed accidents and such, they seem to have these random combinations of letters for names. This is regardless of age or ethnicity, or for that matter, gender. Men and women have equally weird names. It isn't even limited to this particular urban area, because sometimes you see people in Oklahoma or Arkansas or wherever and they're all like Codefur and other strange things.
I may have mentioned this before: there's a kid at my school whose first name is Behcet*. I asked him once how to pronounce that and he said he didn't know and I should just call him Fred, like everyone else. Why ... WHY would someone name a child Behcet* and not even teach him to say it?
No question, names are not the same the world over, but they bear a similarity, which is primarly that they are recognized as names. Igor and Gal are names, they are real names, they are not random letters. Even the ubiquitous last names as first names -- I met a kid named either Car*ter Spen*cer or Spen*cer Car*ter, I'm not sure which -- are names, although I'm not wild about the trend, it's a valid name choice if you like that kind of thing.
I hope no one reading this is proudly named Loquaine or Hrand, because ... well, I just hope not.
And I haven't even gotten started on the hyphenated last name thing, which is all the rage. Everyone ought to just name their children Mary or William Smith and get on with it. Okay?
