The Pleasures of Naming

May Fitzpatrick

I think I got my joy for naming from my mother, May Fitzpatrick. It’s part of my Irish temperament. In 1937 she named my first dog, Heinz, because it was such a mischling that you could easily see its 57 diverse varieties. (John Kerry’s wife Theresa got her gelt from the Pittsburg family factory famous for the diversity of its eating products.) We won’t go into the messes Heinz caused at Holy Rosary Academy when the nuns foolishly let my mother’s summer whim (a dog is good for a fatherless child) follow me in the fall to Bay City.

Our first family dog in the 1960’s we called Barnaby. There was little visible correlation between his sweet flakiness and that somewhat imposing moniker. So we often used famous short cuts like “The Barknob”. In the loneliness of my divorce, I bought a tiger cat back from the SPCA pound. He was so archetypically tiger, I called him Toby.

When he inevitably went to that Great Litter Box in the Sky, I returned to the SPCA and brought home Twoby. I was about to replace him with Threeby, when I inherited some money, quit teaching, and took a postdoctoral education snooping in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. There’d be a Threeby, even a Fourby even my cat averse German wife said it was my computer room or a litter box. Not both.

One of my first passions growing up in Detroit was the Paradise Theatre on Woodward Avenue, the main drag, and conveniently close to the Cultural Center with the Main Library and Detroit Institute of Arts--so you could play hooky with an esthetic cover. Actually my humanistic education began there, watching the great “colored” dance bands of the 40’s and 50’s: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Earl “Fatha” Hines, and later the Motown Supremes.

It was my first onomastic experience: the blacks were compensating for their low esteem in the white super culture by assuming the names of royalty to snidely mock the fake egalitarianism of their “enemies”. King Oliver started the tradition way back in New Orleans. The Paradise name itself was analogous onomastic compensation, which I only found out in 1980 when I took my brother Mike back to bury him next to Mother May—in Mount Olivet Cemetery!

Courtesy of a Bicentennial historical plaque, I learned that the Paradise was originally Orchestra Hall, home of the Detroit Symphony. When the blacks moved up for the South during World War II for the good defense jobs, the whites fled to the burbs and their orchestra pitched its new (inferior) tent next to the Detroit River. No less an ear than Pablo Casals said it was the best performing space in North America. Little did we care watching vaudeville stars like PegLeg Bates entertain while we patiently waiting for the Duke.

In one of the very few happy endings in poor disintegrating Detroit, a benignly obsessed oboe player in the DSO raised twenty three million dollars to rehab the abandoned Paradise in 1982 and reopened it with a flair: the 500,000th Steinway designed by a great American wood artist. I dropped by for a rehearsal, to tease the oboist for destroying My Youth. “Hell, you say,” he tartly replied, "we have a jazz concert every Saturday night!”

When it came time to name my first batch of kids—Michael (1952), Catherine (1954), and Timothy (1956), we went Hibernian. My first wife was a kraut (father Schneider, mother Stocker) but German still had a not very welcome ring. So we went Hibernian. Except that Catherine Ann, as befit the offspring of two English professors, was a stealth tribute to a writer we were inordinately fond of at the time, Katherine Anne Porter!. Change the “K” to “C” and drop an “e”.

My latest child, until I saw it, was the last thing on earth I wanted in my 80’s. It was the only thing my young wife (40, and on the brink) wanted. She won, in vitro, after five tries! I got to name him, after ugly spats (during the pregnancy) over non starters like Leopold and Hellmutt. Ooff.

My first batch of names (for a Catholic slowly losing his faith) saint’s names were de rigeur. I chose a secular saint and hero of mine—Daniel Patrick Moynihan—to name Danny Boy. “Who?” My skeptical wife exclaimed. I Googled to his name in the Wikipedia and held forth: “Born poor in Tulsa (an Okie? that was new to me!), moved very young to Harlem where he shined shoes among other lowly occupations, Tufts U (not yet an Ivy, he!), started gaining a national rep working with Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer, was by firm principal nonpartisan, having worked for JFK; LBJ and Richard Nixon among others.”

“O.K., O.K.” Hildegard replied testily. (The list of German names was much, much longer, but I don’t want to repeat that experience!) “And he preceded Hilary Rodham Clinton as New York Senator,” bringing down to a name she recognized. So Daniel Patrick Hazard it is. I still have to deal with my Catholic relatives about the planned Lutheran baptism!

But the pleasures of naming are not restricted to one’s idiolect. (Linguists allege that each person has a use of language as unique as the fingerprint, or to be more up to date DNA.) And so do groups, even nations. Consider, for example, the American idiolect: early in the Jacksonian period working class Americans resented being regarded as “servants”. So they made up the euphemism “help”. You will see in the American idiolect a playing out of such illusions as to how we should be or actually are.

It all began with the ubiquitous “New”. New England, New Hampshire, New Netherland (morphed into New York). This linguistic trait is not unique for those who ultimately became American. Think of New Guinea, New Zealand, even New Hebrides—all manifestations of that first surge of globalization the Iberians began and the English, French, and Germans in their own ways and at their different speeds continued.

But shortly after the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the American frontier closed—in 1893, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a year late for the 400th anniversary due to a ill-timed financial panic, our politicians started using “New” in a more or less defensive way. The frontier may have closed, but we still have a great future: Teddy Roosevelt coined his program the New Nationalism, implying that the whole country had to learn how to bust trusts and keep “malefactors of great wealth” from taking over.

A decade later, that selectively idealistic head of Princeton and later governor of New Jersey Woodrow Wilson, talked about the “New Freedom” as a political program. We are more familiar with FDR’s “New Deal” after the great stumble of Normalcy run by Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. JFK picked the newness shtick with his “New Frontier”, marking almost a century of speculating what America’s egalitarian future would become when the physical frontier that was supposed to shape our national character was closed. Space, dreamt JFK, and saw to it that we flew to the moon. Our national idiolect is obsessed with the fear that our “New” may be over.

And then there’s the “studied casual”, that Humphrey Bogartish attire that looks very natural but is actually very artificial. Nice ‘n’ Easy does it. The “and” minus its first and last letters is endemic in our national talk and advertising. I think it suggested everyone could buy his way to a happy life, if he only surrounded himself with neat things. It’s a Saturday Evening Post version of America, a loosey goosey Normal Rockwell ideal.

What I think it implies is that there was a wide, even widening, indeed ever widening, gap between the American egalitarian Dream and how things were on the ground. Most Americans don’t realize that the American Dream as a concept didn’t become the standard version of American Exceptionalism before the Depression. (See David Madden’s “The American Dream”, LSU Press, 1966).

Bigness was also a basic trait of the American idiolect: The Whopper! The suffix –arama is a popular manifestation of this obsession with bigness. Note the fun headline writers are having now with Obama-arama! I even invented a part game I called “Suffixes”. (What do you call a sheep stud farm? A RAMARAMA!) When the guests got too loaded to think up new daffy definitions, we played the complementary quiz, “Prefixes”, based on the British penchant for using the prefix, “mini”, any and everywhere. (What do you call an undersized bull? A MINITAUR.) And so on, and on, and on. Niagara Falls, Grand Canyon, The Rockies, The Mississippi. Bigness was all, in our national character. And our idiolect shows it.

Humor is also a goofy American trait. I read recently about a small Missouri village (pop. 83) that named itself Tightwad, after a nasty dispute between a postman and a grocer over what a watermelon should cost. When a small bank was set up in 1984 in that blip in the road, patrons from all over the United States sent their money there, $3 millions was the high point. They wanted replicas of its logo, a tight fist with a sheaf of dollar bills! Students stole the village sign. Tourists bought T-shirts by the bale. MSB just pulled the plug on the Tightwad Bank because its population growth, 83-91, in 23 years was not the expansion they expected. Damn Tightwads!

Names, names, names. Personal idiolect. And national idiolect. Genesis starts with the naming of creation. It keeps on going. Nothing impersonal. It just the way the world works.