Name Branded : Attention, Merlin, Scooter, Bunny and Saddam: Your Names Might as Well Be Mud
IT’S AMAZING HOWcertain names really bother people. Broad-minded, sensible, otherwise-tolerant individuals make snap judgments on the basis of a one- or two-name introduction. And it doesn’t matter what you’re called; you can’t escape discrimination. Everybody is a name bigot.
Take me, for example. Recently, I got a call from my sister, Laurie. “I met a man,” she began. “His name is Merlin.” I didn’t need to hear that he owned a crystal shop, that he had a sword hanging on the wall--Excalibur?--before I advised her to pass. Merlin is hardly a name that inspires confidence. As my friend Marjorie later put it more bluntly, “It means bum .”
“You have to watch out for names from King Arthur’s court,” Laurie agreed. “You don’t want to go out with anyone named Gareth or Percivale. And Lancelot--or worse, Lance--is also a bad bet.” In general, anyone named after a fictional character seems worth avoiding, if only because you’d feel pretty silly moaning, “Ivanhoe, Ivanhoe,” in the throes of passion.
“How about a guy over the age of 30 who calls himself Scooter?” my husband, Duke, asks later. How about a guy who calls himself Duke?
Name bias isn’t rational. Then again, prejudice never is. Sometimes, a name just conjures up unfortunate images. “I went out with a man named Ray,” Laurie said. “I couldn’t even say his name out loud. I kept expecting him to spin a pizza dough.”
Other names you just can’t trust. Once, when Duke and I were dating, I was at his apartment when a statuesque blonde knocked on the door. When she learned he wasn’t home, she sighed and said, “Be sure to tell him Bunny stopped by.”
“Believe me,” I muttered. “I will.”
“Bunny was probably just lonely and wanted to talk,” Duke said when he returned. But Bunnys (like Bambis, Brandys, Chrissys and Tiffanys) aren’t generally known for their snappy repartee.
“There’s usually a problem when nicknames have a y on the end,” says a friend who goes by the name of Preacher. “Take Freddy. That’s a good litmus test. If you’re not prejudiced against that name, then there’s something wrong with you. Actually, any name with a y --Johnny, Tommy, Timmy--didn’t these people ever grow up? And it’s even worse for women--Sherry, Taffy, Candy, Kitty--it takes the dignity right out of a person.”
Speaking of dignity, Preacher admits, “I’d be prejudiced toward someone with a name like mine. But part of the fun of having it is watching people’s reaction and seeing if they’re sensible.” What’s sensible? “The raised eyebrow, a smirk, a step back. The non-wise reaction: ‘That’s an interesting name. How did you get that?’ ”
Actually, in a way I prefer almost any moniker to some of the names that imaginative couples are currently giving their kids. My sister-in-law Robbie, just named her third child Samara Leigh, a name she dug out of a baby-name book about the size of an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. A roster of my other nieces and nephews sounds like cottages at a swanky resort in the Mediterranean: Zara, Erica, Alina, Adam, Elon, Imogene, Emma, Ariel.
My friend Wendy is aunt to Ruby, Tripoli, Matisse and Jake. “Cathy and Barbara are beginning to sound nice to me,” Wendy says. “I’m so sick of some of these yuppie names I can hardly get them out of my mouth. Like Zoe, Chelsea and Dakota.
“Imagine your name is Dakota and you go to play school, and there are five others,” says Wendy, who met two Dakotas last week. “Couples are actually going through the states. Carolina, Indiana. Florida.” What’s next? New York? “There’s already a kid named Jersey on my block.”
And to think that my friend Jane was contemptuous when her sister named her daughter Elizabeth. “I realized that if she could pick that name, I didn’t know who my sister was,” Jane says. “The only Elizabeth we had known was a person we both really despised.”
Many name bigots feel that once you have a negative experience with someone, then anyone with that person’s name is cursed, which leads me to believe that there aren’t going to be a lot of little Saddams pitter-pattering around the United States any time soon. And other chauvinists are suspicious of men with women’s names and vice versa. And then there are names that seem like bad omens.
“I was looking for a new eye doctor,” Laurie said, “and I called a friend. He said, ‘I know a great ophthalmologist. His name is Dr. Tingle.’ I immediately refused to see him. I don’t care how good a doctor he is. Though I suppose it could have been worse. Dr. Tingle could have been a gynecologist.”
Of course, some names do evoke a positive response. The last time I was in New York, for example, I met with a new editor. “Hello,” she said, “My name is Margot.”
I liked her immediately.