What's in a Name?
QUEENAN, JOE
What's in a Name? If it's Rhiannon, quite a lot, actually. by Joe Queenan In the astoundingly popular bestseller Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt argues that people with absurd names have trouble...
...It's like saying, "No, my parents didn't name me Vito Corleone after the guy in The Godfather...
...The roster was dominated by names like Cody, Kelsee, Ciera, Allegra, Colette, Cataline, Sarraye, Maren, Koreen, Oakley, Avery, Sadi, Jade, Kinsey, Leela, Kendall, Ashlee, Michaela, Ayla, Terace, Becca, Tymer, Kieron, Brandi, Kelsey, Taylor, Morgan, Whitney, Brittany, Kaela, Ireland, Amari, and Storm...
...Why should the plight of a victim named Rhiannon concern the rest of us...
...This may be true, but it fails to address the repercussions of living in a society where stupid names are fast becoming the norm...
...But there is another, far more selfish, reason why we should be concerned about the proliferation of astoundingly stupid names...
...True, cynics might argue that a person can be blamed for keeping the name Rhiannon, but in doing so, they unfeelingly ignore the psychic substructure that animates contemporary nomenclature...
...Not long ago, a friend moved from Princeton, New Jersey, to Boise, Idaho...
...All because someone, somewhere, decided to name their child after a Stevie Nicks song...
...If we assume that Rhiannon's parents were Fleetwood Mac fans, there is every possibility that she has siblings bearing late '70s Easy Listening names like "Sara" and "Tusk...
...This does not play well in Peoria...
...She was like a cat in the dark / And then she was the darkness...
...The nitwit he selects immediately raises interest rates, triggering a housing market collapse and a devastating global depression...
...Then they force their child to spend the rest of her life insisting that she was not named after the Fleetwood Mac Rhi-annon, but for a beloved progenitor, Granny Rhiannon or Tugboat Rhiannon, or perhaps even a mythical proto-Rhiannon who provided the original inspiration for the song...
...And the people who named their children Elmer were probably doing their level best under difficult circumstances...
...And one day Rhiannon will beget Clytemeghan or Zugwah...
...But what if her parents, despite the decisive cultural and chronological evidence linking them with Stevie Nicks, captiously insist that they did not name their child Rhiannon because of the band's single, but because of an entirely different Rhiannon...
...She conceded that it was hard to keep a straight face during class because she could not stop visualizing Stevie Nicks enmeshing herself in her bewitching womanly Joe Queenan is the author, most recently, of Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile's Pilgrimage to the Mother Country...
...What should concern us is that each generation of stupid names encourages the next generation to be even stupider...
...by Joe Queenan In the astoundingly popular bestseller Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt argues that people with absurd names have trouble landing jobs not because of their names, but because people with ludicrous names tend to come from poor backgrounds, and it is a crummy education that creates the roadblock to success...
...But because the president fears that he will be mocked if he chooses a Fed chairman named Rhiannon, he opts for the safer choice: Brandi or Tiffany...
...Cher could not suddenly become Madonna...
...But not if your kid's named Rhiannon...
...This can be written off as the folly of youth: It seemed like a good idea at the time...
...Here, she enrolled her six-year-old daughter in a ballet class...
...This makes the girl with the marquis name seem petulant and affected...
...By and large, the American people are loath to tolerate cabinet-level weirdness—unless, as in the case of Condoleezza Rice, one is given a pass because of membership in a free-wheeling ethnic group that makes its own rules...
...But if it is true that those possessing names like George, James, and Nancy are more likely to ascend to high public office than those named Melchior, Babarina, or Crustacea, we are justified in assuming that certain career options—Archbishop of Canterbury, CEO of Intel— may have closed themselves off to Rhi-annon at a very early date...
...this would only make a bad situation worse...
...While in Boise, my friend took a kick-boxing class with a young woman named Rhiannon...
...they named me after the Vito Corleone who invented the mosh pit...
...For most of us grow into the names we are given, and cannot discard them without sacrificing a certain measure of our personality...
...Nor can those hamstrung by unfortunate names toss them overboard without implicitly repudiating their parents, or at least questioning their judgment...
...It was Morgan that begat Kyla...
...There is also concern that one of our sons could enter into a morganatic marriage with a femme fatale named Rhiannon, vastly increasing the likelihood that our grandchildren will be named Mordred, Banquo, or Xena...
...It was one thing when frivolous people in Laurel Canyon started naming their progeny Dweezil, Cheyenne, and Brooklyn, but what happens when the epidemic of idiotic nomenclature hits bedrock Middle America...
...Partially because we are compassionate human beings and understand that a child named Rhiannon or Brooklyn or Skyler will spend the rest of his life fending off ridicule from thugs named Cheech the Mook...
...But these were real names, not synthetic ones...
...they had hogs to feed or a bad case of rickets...
...Lucky Luciano could not have traded in his moniker for Spanky McGetti-gan...
...The kick-boxing arts, or what the French refer to as les dons pedicombat-iques, are not to be scorned, disparaged, or heaped with contumely...
...And here we lock horns with a phenomenon known as the Greenspan Algorithm: the inescapable truth that while the public might allow someone who once worshipped Ayn Rand to set interest rates, it would never let anyone actually named Ayn do it, because people named Ayn sound like they may be Sith Lords...
...Dreams unwind, love's a state of mind...
...Purists may argue that previous generations also had ridiculous names like Elmer, Caleb, and Purvis...
...As luck would have it, the woman named, say, Rhiannon Cougar Mellen-camp, is far more gifted than her rival...
...Inevitably, it would lead to whispers about the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Knights Templar: the whole Da Vinci Code complex...
...So if you're reading these lines, and you have an unnamed child on the way, I implore you to heed the words of Fleetwood Mac themselves: Don't stop thinking about tomorrow / It'll be better than before...
...shawls while the instructor's namesake —or even the instructor herself—was taken by, taken by the wind: Sometimes she took to the sky like a bird in flight / Other times she rang like a bell in the night, my friend recalls...
...It was Anson that begot Heath...
...She did not ask how the woman got her name, assuming that it derived from the late-'70s Fleet-wood Mac smash hit...
...By contrast, in the case of a white woman named Rhiannon, the American people would be reluctant to accept her ascendancy to chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or chief CBS White House correspondent not because of the distressing pop cultural connotations but because the name Rhiannon smacks of the occult and the druidic, both of which are verboten in a Judeo-Christian society where people justifiably fear sorcery at both the state and federal level...
...Obviously, no one can be held responsible for having the name Rhi-annon...
...Suppose a few decades down the road the president of the United States is forced to choose between two candidates for chairmanship of the Federal Reserve...
Vol. 12 • December 2006 • No. 14
