Naming the baby, making a word

Naming a child is the only opportunity that most people get to anoint an entity in the world with a word of their own choosing.

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Genesis says Adam was charged with naming all the animals. The rest of us get to name our own kids, as Steven Pinker reminds us, but that is about it. New words are accepted into the language every year, but chances are you and I aren't responsible for any of them. We may not even think of a name as being a word, but of course it is. Some names even make it into dictionaries, but again chances are you and I are not among them. Names like Abraham Lincoln and Aristotle are.

Some names are one of a kind, or nearly so. Others are as common as John Smith and Mary Brown. Unique names stand out in a crowd or in a classroom, but at least John Smith and Mary Brown don't have to spell their names each time they say them. And they probably weren't ridiculed for their names in junior high.

Most parents take their responsibility in naming seriously, although some not seriously enough. I am thinking here of those whose children's names may bring difficulty later on in life. My son went to college with a girl named Lovechild, the daughter apparently of former hippies. Frank Zappa gave his children names like Moon Unit and Dweezil. Former heavyweight boxer George Foreman named each of his sons George and each of his daughters some variation of George. One wonders what happened each time the phone rang in the Foreman home and the caller asked to speak to George.

Parents may consider all kinds of things when naming a baby. Children are often named after parents or grandparents. Some are named after famous people or even places. Some think about how a first name will go with the last name. Some like alliteration, as in Peter Parker, while others want a single-syllable first name to go with a multi-syllable last name, or vice versa.

Most of us just go with names we like, which is why names go in and out of style. We tend to like the same names everybody else in our generation likes, those that happen to be fashionable at the time. We can often guess the age of a person by his or her first name. Harold or Dorothy? Probably a senior citizen. Jennifer or Jason? Probably in their 40s, give or take a decade. My grandchildren are called Aly and Max. When I was in school I knew nobody with those names, but they know several.

Some names never seem to go out of style, such as John and Mary, mentioned above. Or David or Robert or Steven for boys. We named our son Daniel, and that name seems to have aged well. For girls, names like Elizabeth, Anne and Sarah seem to be timeless.

We get only so many chances to pick a name, or to create a word, while some people, being childless, get no chance at all. We need to make the most of those chances. Those names, those words, will last much longer (on tombstones and in public records) than the individuals who temporarily possess them.