Onomastics as Geriatric Sex

As my passions began to ebb in my seventies, I was astonished to perceive that I was getting more and more kicks from onomastics—the semi-science of naming! Geesh. Better a tacky seaport than a shipwreck, eh? Anyway I didn’t start out onomastically. I didn’t learn the term until graduate school. (It comes from the Greek word “to name”, ONOMAZEIN.)

As a Roman Catholic seminarian in the 1940’s I actually studied Greek for almost three years—until I was peremptorily thrown out over Easter Vacation by the Rector Monsignor Donnelley, who caught me and Jim Van Slambrouck smoking in the Gothic Tower after midnight!

But my word sensitivity started far earlier when my beloved kindergarten teacher at Holy Rosary Academy explained her own name, Sister Mary Felicia. “Felicia,” she explained, “came from the Latin for 'happy'.” She was that all right, and that’s she made me most of the time. My Irish mother, May Fitzpatrick showed her Gaelic humor by naming my first dog, a Mischling mutt if ever there was one, “Heinz”, alluding to the 57 varieties of dog he seemed to embody. By the way, the name "May" is Americanized Roman Catholic Mariolatry; she was born May 19, 1895, so her mother Catherine memorialized her as a Mary born in May.

And I learned early the precariousness of naming. My elder brother, Harry E. Hazard, Jr. was in the hospital for infantile paralysis at the same time I was being operated on for a bad ear infection. When some smart ass Irish nurse was told that my name was Pat, she joked, "Ah! Pat and Mike, eh?” And my brother was Mike for the rest of his life.

The first time I got a jag on about names was when I had started going to the Paradise Theatre in Detroit, where the “colored” name bands played—between western flicks and vaudeville gigs like Pegleg Bates. Earl “Fatha” Hines, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, King Oliver, and later, in my hometown Motown Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul. It didn’t take me long to conclude that his compensatory onomastics derived from a feeling of enforced inferiority in the Pre Civil Rights Era. And I couldn’t help being pleased when Cassius Clay, the name itself suggesting a patina of Roman elegance, opted for Muhammed Ali, arguing intelligently that he had no dog in the Vietnamese Hunt. I couldn’t help noticing either that singularly inventive moniker, Aretha. If I had a nickel for every sweetly odd “black” name I picked up on reading the Detroit Times, I might have become a linguist.

Names were indeed magical. Heh, ain’t that the genesis of it all, in Genesis. Naming Creation. My first wife was twice German, Schneider father Stocker mother. So when we came to naming our three, German was still post World War II putz. So Hibernian names prevailed. Michael, middle name David, for euphony’s (and my middle name’s) sake. Katherine Anne Porter was a reading passion for both of us English Lit parent when our first daughter came along. We dubbed her Catherine Ann Hazard, but we had internalized the allusion. Our third child became Timothy Mark. Timothy because it’s sweet name. Mark because it gives a lilt to the formal appellation.

Fifty years later, there was only one thing my forty year younger German wife wanted. A baby, before she got too old to try. First she tried Jena doctors. NO GO. For two reasons. It didn’t take and you couldn’t know who the sperm donor was. So off to more relaxed Berlin where my wife could actually schmooze with the donor, a budding scientist in Potsdam. And her in vitro took on the fourth take.

During the pregnancy we talked and talked about possible names. She hadn’t wanted to fly blind in vitro and end up with a Turk or a black. But the pain of Germanic names was almost more than I could take. LEOPOLD? I could never talk to so named a Kraut. EBERHARDT: I’d rather he be Lion-hearted. JOHANNES? OR ITS CUT RATE VERSION HANNES: Yuck. I’d rather “he” (science let us in on this “secret” early) carry the moniker Charlemagne than some of those we rejected out of hand.

I think my wife grew tired of the debate and conceded the field to me. Now I had been brought up to think Saint This and Saint That. Patrick was an interesting Roman, roaming up North to to civilize the unChristian Celts. But I’ve never been a professional Hibernian—I even refuse to drink on St. Patrick’s Day as a way of protesting drunken foolishness. But it wasn’t until I was writing a story on an Irish poet in Belfast that I learned the real St. Pat story in an exhibition at the Ulster Museum. The Cult of St. Patrick didn’t begin until the twelfth century when immigrant Lords of their newly acquired manors (remember Guillaume le Conquerant) devised it to manage his lowly Irish peasants.

So it wasn’t Hibernian Pride that prompted me to name our first multi-culti child Daniel Patrick after the New York Senator Moynihan. I liked his story. Born poor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he was (aged six) moved to poor New York neighborhoods, shining shoes at that age to help family finances; attended a tacky second rate University (Tufts), and only later as a confidant of Richard Nixon (he explained our urban malaise through the fatal concept of “defining deviancy down”.) I had been brought up to believe you needed patron saints to guide you through life’s perils. As an atheist approaching a happy senility, I no longer believe in Saints qua Saints. (I still admire Saints Francis, Elizabeth, and Martin!) But I want to honor secular statesmen/women types: If I had a girl child now I’d consider her honored to be named after Eleanor Roosevelt or Dorothy Day.

As for Onomastics as Geriatric Sex, no Sunday of mine is complete until I savor Bill Safire’s latest sally into the multifarious universes of Names. My pal Walt Whitman used to sing in “Leaves of Grass” that “the hinge of the hand puts to scorn all machinery/and Mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillion of infidels.”

How true... But a tongue trumps a wrist any day, doing its work.