Name game

Today I've read two interesting articles about names and naming; the first in Slate (from last week) gives strange examples of people requesting legal changes and the latter in the NY Times visits the Ohio town of Knockemstiff (subject of an eponymous book). The former makes a Johnny Cash joke, and my favorite detail from the NYT story is that the online moniker for one of the interviewees is "Knockemstiffmom."

My favorite (English) professor was particularly into naming: here is his book. I got into it too, and continued writing papers about it, most appropriately for a Dickens class a few years later. Not that something like Hard Times is a very subtle book overall, but hello, school authorities named M'Choakumchild and Thomas Gradgrind. When applied to nonfiction, that is, actual people, good naming is a fine balance between creativity, snobbery, and absurdity. Forcing the name Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii on your kid is just unfair. Why not just Talula? Lulu? Cute! And then there are kids such as those in Robert Rodriguez's clan: Rocket, Racer, Rebel, and Rogue. I like your movies, RR, and love alliteration, but give me a break--like you did your daughter, Rhiannon. Or, for fairness's sake, why couldn't she be Rally or Roar or Relentless? To my 20-something, nonparent mind, it just reeks of forcing your own identity on your kid.

Place-naming doesn't seem to have to play by quite the same rules, because it's attached to something that doesn't have to go to school and get beat up after attendance is taken. At least, Americans have consistently given themselves more room to be literal. A quick Google search turned up Hot Coffee, Miss., Truth or Consequences, N.M, and Sugar Tit, S.C. The source of the first seems sort of obvious (some place with coffee), the New Mexico town renamed itself after a radio contest in 1950. As for Sugar Tit, apparently they want to give up the name (!). My hometown, Emmaus, Pa., has a straightforward Biblical origin, as do nearby Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Egypt. That does not, however, account for East Texas, Pa.