What's In a Name?

I typically don’t take jabs at literary top dogs, but I may have to agree to disagree with good ol’ Shakespeare. A rose by any other name might smell just as sweet... but let’s be honest: if a rose were called something else, it might smell glorious but it just wouldn’t sound as sweet. There’s something powerful about a name; the people and personalities that are embodied by them, the elegant loops of curvey letters, the crisp sounds of hard consonants. Everything about a person, their idiosyncrasies, talents, and vices, somehow find themselves encapsulated in a word- his name- and in the process, define that person’s name for us.

For this very reason my own parents with their first born’s due date impending twenty-some years ago pored over baby name books, searching for something fresh that didn’t come with a string of vague acquaintances and old friends attached to it, and with a bit more depth in value so as they could tell me something drew them to my moniker beyond, “We just liked the sound of it.” Quite humorously, I entered the world with a dynamite set of lungs but not much else to separate me from the rest of new arrivals at the maternity ward, other than an ambitious couplet of proper names that together mean, “Victorious Conqueror”. All throughout my childhood my mom would use the meaning of my name to champion me on, and using this “victorious conqueror” mantra to ease a multitude of scraped knees and hurt feelings and exude confidence in my successes. Much to my chagrin, I’m embarrassed to say that this mantra went as far as to come with it’s own theme song and cheer.

There are more days than not when I feel like my name’s meaning is more of an aspiration than a self-fulfilling prophecy- and lest you think my name came from the heavens, let me remind you that it’s fairly common and clearly dates me to the decade I was born- but I have to say, the thought and care taken towards bestowing a cherished meaning on to me was worth its weight in gold growing up.

And so it was only natural when the stork was in transit to our house, that the name game was a tall order for my husband and me. Knowing the positive impact of having a strong name meaning meant that like my parents, the Hubs & I also wanted to chose a name that had value beyond it’s sound and flow with our last name. Thankfully, with our first it was as if our son’s name had found us, not the other way around. After two years of recreationally throwing around names to a husband who didn’t see the point in naming children that didn’t yet exist, the world stood still (or rather, my world stood still) when he looked at me one day and out of the blue said, “I like Luke.” It was as simple as that. A done deal. Soon after theoretical baby boy #1’s first name was determined, a teenage cousin of mine tragically died of a heart condition. Our hearts broke over a life that seemed so full of potential and yet was cut so short. It seemed only fitting that we use his name, Aaron, as a tribute and middle name for our Luke.  And so it was, without even cracking open the cover of a single baby name book, we had inadvertently named a first born son that was at this point still non-existent. Imagine our surprise then when a sonographer confirmed that we were going to have a boy one year later. I felt a bit like the priest Zechariah might have when he proclaimed of his first born son, “His name shall be John.” Our son shall be Luke Aaron. It seemed ironic that we would choose names without even knowing their meaning- after all, that was our top prerequisite. After the birth certificate was signed and we brought our cherubic, albeit colicky, bundle home, we did a little digging to find out what his names meant. I still get goosebumps when I think of scanning through the pages of a worn library copy of Bruce Lansky’s 100,000 Baby Names. Luke meant “light”. Aaron meant “on a hill”. Our “light on a hill” was then, and still is to this day, just that- the light of our lives.

Flash forward nineteen months later and we found ourselves stumped at round two of Name That Baby. Somehow this time proved more challenging. A name didn’t find us. My husband, the ever practical man that he is, didn’t find it fruitful to even consider names until we knew what we were having. So we found ourselves twenty-plus weeks gestation with another little bundle of snips and snails and puppy dog tails that still remained nameless. Not only did we feel like committing ourselves to any name we simply liked would be settling, but we also had to factor what sounded good with Big Brother’s name. Luke was biblical. Were we somehow bound by some unwritten code of baby naming ethics to follow suit from thereafter? That seems almost laughable: growing up in a fairly conservative circle, most of my peers were Matthews and Joshuas, Sarahs and Rachels. At that time I vowed I would never consider Biblical names when I had children of my own because they sounded so blase and overused. Ironically, here I was with a second child on the way, wondering if we should continue to go a route I once deemed unthinkable. Antsy and determined to give this child a name before contractions kicked in, we agreed on a name that we kept coming back to: Quinn. We made it “Facebook official”, I journaled to the sweet babe in my womb calling him by name, and then the unthinkable happened: I started having second thoughts a few weeks before his due date. I loved Quinn- but it just didn’t feel right in my gut as his first name. I kicked myself for being over-zealous about sharing a name that was looking more than likely as if it would take second fiddle to something else and I prayed that no sweet grandmotherly figures in our social circle were tediously monogramming a blanket for a Baby Q that was no longer Baby Q. In an odd twist of fate, a name I’d never really given much thought to rose up to not only be a favorite, but something I absolutely adored: Samuel. Yes, it was Biblical so it followed the trend we had started. A definite plus. But something about having a Sam sounded so timeless and classic, too. So many children’s classics popped into my heads, with main characters named Sam, I found out that it was much more popular in the UK than the States (which don’t ask me why, but the foreign appeal was very attractive to me), and along those lines, even though it sounded so common, I had yet to meet a single Sam in my life. When I researched what Samuel Quinn meant together, though, it was a sealed deal: Wise is the man whose God is the Lord. Once again, we found a winner, my friends!

And now, pregnant with number #3,  here we are once again at the drawing board. It’s become a familiar place, I tell you. Thankfully, after four years of parenthood, we’ve had adequate time to process a girl’s name. Time- and a soon approaching 20 week ultrasound- will tell if we get to use it. Otherwise, if you need me, you can find me huddled in a corner with Bruce Lansky’s 100,000 Baby Names and a notepad in hand, studiously looking for that “perfect name” with a “perfect meaning”.