A rose by any other name...

I am fascinated by names, by the importance of names, the impor-tance humans attach to names. If we start talking to someone we don't know, we feel compelled early on to introduce ourselves, to provide that person with our name, with the expectation being that s/he in turn will provide us with a name. We become more real to one another, more substantial, once we have exchanged names.

We feel insulted if we're with someone who starts talking to someone else, and fails to introduce us. Introducing us gives us a name, at which point we cease to be invisible; we become real.

We get upset if others misspell our names. Our names represent us, stand for us; we want people to get them right. I'm not one of those Melodies with an 'i,e', I'm this particular Melody, with a 'y.' It's not Camp, it's Norman-Camp.

And it isn't just names of people that are important. We don't like feeling bad, going to the doctor because we feel bad, having all kinds of tests done, and then not being provided with a name for what's wrong with us. ("Sorry, all your tests are within the normal range." -- in other words, we haven't a clue what's wrong with you.)

People can have the wrong name. I have two friends who definitely have the wrong name, though presumably they don't think so. One is one of my oldest friends -- we go back to Accelerated English class and American Government class, sophomore year of high school -- when she was Carol. A very common name back then, along with Linda, and Judy, and Barbara, and Patricia (always called Pat, or Patty), and Diane. Names people don't give their daughters anymore. These days it's Kaitlyn or Alexis or Abigail or Isabella or Madison or Emma. (Fashions in naming also fascinate me.)

But to get back to Carol. It turns out that Carol is actually her middle name, and some years ago my friend decided to start calling herself by her first name, Martha. When this change took place we were not in touch -- we dropped out of one another's lives for many years, and then dropped back in a few years ago thanks to Classmates.com. When we reconnected I was very surprised to learn that Carol was now Martha. Martha to me is a very old-fashioned name -- I put it in with the likes of Josephine and Geraldine and Mabel, names our grand-mothers might have had. And Carol is hardly an old-fashioned girl. So I've had a hard time thinking of her as Martha, though of course I call her that...though sometimes, in emails, it will be Martha Carol, to take care of both my comfort zone, and her preferences.

Would it have been different if the switch had been the other way around, if I'd known her as Martha in our youth, and she'd then adopted Carol? Would I now be having a hard time thinking of her as Carol? Perhaps, but there's the case of my friend Meaghan, who was born Grace, and was Grace when I first knew her (she was my very first roommate, way back in Washington, D.C. about 100 years ago). Grace always hated her name, and a few decades back decided she was Meaghan, instead. I had absolutely no trouble calling her that, or thinking of her as Meaghan; the name really did seem to suit her better than the old-fashioned 'Grace.' People can have the wrong name.

There's my friend Joey. When I first met him, back in my Boston days, he was Joe. But neither name really suits him, as far as I am concerned. Joe sounds like a bruiser of a Polish stevedore; Joey sounds like a third-generation mafioso. Joey is neither; he's a slight, very bright, very funny newspaperman who has been hit by the dissolution of the newspaper industry (similar to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII), and is filling in time uploading to his Flickr web page the many, many interesting, amusing, quirky pictures he is constantly taking. As far as I'm concerned his name should be Eric, or Elliot or maybe Terry. Something a whole lot lighter than Joe, a lot more intellectual than Joey. But Joey apparently identifies with Joey, just as I identify with Melody, and the friend-formerly-known-as-Grace identifies with Meaghan. These are our claims to who we are, and we want people to get them right. So there.