Names and Naming
Evolving First Names
Tweet Here are the first names of the 18 students in my fall class at Montclair State University: Carolyn, Melina, Pamela, Miguel, Nardeen, Kanequa, Julieth, Leslie, Alaysia, Carla, Milena (two Melinas!), Russell, Charles, Iyana, Kejdi, Aya, Klavdiya, Usman. I suspect that finding out the naming rituals in all of the cultures involved would require a couple of weeks of study; the “Charles,” for example, is a Charles IV. Investigating the meanings of […]
Contemplative pedagogy: Names
Tweet Naming things is an important concept in linguistics. People have cute, or crazy, or insulting names for people and things in their lives, and that is an area for productive study. Grandmother names are my present fixation — I am called Granna. I remember the struggle after 9/11 to find a name for the […]
Naming baby
Tweet My friend Pamela Satran has a delightful blog called Nameberry which is a treasure trove about peoples’ first names, in American culture. As illustrated below, it would be of limited use elsewhere. When my children were born, their father didn’t want any of the usual names and, since he was Australian, went searching in an […]
Playing with language
Tweet A recent article in The New York Times, “My Life’s Sentences,” by the author Jhumpa Lahiri, mentioned one of her favorite sentences. It is in the short story Araby, by James Joyce: “The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed.” Since we had just read this story in class, I […]
What’s Your Name?
Tweet There is a naming website, nameberry.com, established by author Pam Satran, which gets tens of thousands of visits every year. Names are fascinating, and naming things is an important undertaking. I remember after September 11th, nobody knew what to call either the kind of attack or the day itself, and we still don’t have […]