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The Name Shame

(There was no Musing for Monday, March 18. Thank the capriciousness of the gods, and the Blogger site crapping out in the hours I tried to post. To make up for it, just read this entry twice.)

Bounce a few stones around any middle-class US class room and chances are, before being accosted by school security, you’ll hit several Michaels, maybe a couple Davids, and for certain four or five Hannahs and Elizabeths. When it comes to the parents’ duty of providing a name, a paucity of originality for this task in our time — well actually, at any time — saddens and makes me wonder: where are the Evangelias and the Gideons? The Torrences and Maureens? Glance through a history book and you come across names like Cotton and Constance. Almost exotic in their novelness today, though they themselves were once on popularity charts, no doubt.

And before I end up sounding too American (or too white), I’ll point my finger wide and complain how all people of every creed and locale have a top ten list of their own with names fifty percent or more of the planet can locate themselves on. Mohammed, Camille, Hans, Chaniqua: I speak of you. This complaint about a dearth of original names is not just about being different, though it’s primarily that, but because I wish we showed real creativity and a desire towards more interesting, fresh, and imaginative monikers for our offspring. The lack of this makes me dream of a world where we do exactly that.

Or maybe just a world where a better method of naming has been devised.

We are a society of cookie cutter citizens as it is. We don’t need it reflected in how we sign the backs of our credit cards. So in regards to these concerns, I’m recommending to the world that starting as soon as it’s feasible, children should no longer be named by their parents but through a computerized randomly generated selection process. Yes, something like this will be a huge undertaking. As yet I haven’t worked out the details, and it’s obvious such a plan will have some big issues to overcome before it can be successful. I don’t claim to know them all nor how they’ll be solved, but right off the top the most obvious to me are:

We need a lot more names.

Sure, you can find large tomes of baby names sitting in your local bookstore, but the actual number of unique ones out there doesn’t match up to the sheer volume of people we’ll have to assign them to if we want to do more than just level out the dispersal pattern. I’d prefer we not go to numbers for everyone, so this means we’ll either need to make up completely new ones, or begin using ordinary words as proper names. If nobody has any objection to names like Pencil, Gravel, or Whack, then what direction to take is easy.

Someone needs to do the initial work.

I can hear the cries over misuse of government, but I believe there are ways we can manage it with little to no government control. Certainly at some point we’ll need our political leaders to get this into place and running, but to start, I see an opportunity to use the model of the open source community. May appear unusual, but through a project like this we can create the systems and software necessary for maintaining and assigning names. Non-computer specialists will also be required for the task of gathering and organizing names within variables of language, region, religion, and others. The possibility a Muslim won’t like the name Jesus has to be taken into account. And we’ll need an auditing team to discard offensive and abusive names. Nobody likes being called Asshole, so we need to avoid this.

I know my idea is a lot to take in, and will certainly meet with a good deal of opposition. I myself wasn’t all that hot about it at first, even coming to me after a night sorting through my address book. But consider this: with all the aggravation and stress of having a child involves, with all the things you have to think about as you prepare for your baby to come into the world, your burden can be lessened, if just a little, by having his or her name already picked out for you. If we do it right, you might even get a list to choose from.

We had our chance and to pick good names for our kids, and we blew it. Time to find a better way.