Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual THE GAME OF THE NAME I fancy myself a connoisseur of the naming of Americans, and as such have discovered that we gringos do a few things in this line that no one else does. George W....
...Townsend Hoopes and McGeorge Bundy seem to work well enough...
...Handel-man, surely, plays his Stanley Myron for a small laugh...
...Jewish men and women, I note, are now three-naming themselves...
...I went through basic training with an entirely unpretentious guy named Daniel Thomas III, whose suffix was a fat pitch right in the kitchen of every sergeant he encountered: "You, Third, get you ass down there and give me twenty of your best or there ain't going to be no Fourth...
...How long this has been going on is not clear...
...The Jewish men of my father's generation were given rather stately names: Sidney, Bernard, Louis, Saul, Maurice, Irving...
...The poet Delmore Schwartz claimed that his parents, in naming him, must have had a Pullman car in mind...
...Some old Jewish names—Melvin, Isaac, Myron— appear to have become African-American first names...
...The first names of my co-religionists have undergone a number of alterations over the years...
...Henry James does a nice bit on the comedy of American middle initials in Daisy Miller, where Daisy's brat brother Randolph cites each member of his family with his or her middle initial included...
...Poor Dr...
...Barry Alan Shain, a political scientist, and Louis Daniel Brod-sky, a poet, and Stanley Myron Han-delman, a comedian, must have liked the rhythm that adding on their middle names gives, though Mr...
...The reversion to older names had a brief fling, and for a while many a newly minted Max or Sam or Ben felt the mohel's blade...
...John Burnham Schwartz, author of Bicycle Days, perhaps wished to establish that he is the child of a mixed marriage...
...Others—Maurice, Seymour, Barney—do not seem destined for immediate recycling...
...English professors from olden days used to have triple-barreled names, like George Barrow Woodbury, names that all but put a wing-collar under their possessors' chins...
...They are probably attempting not so much to add distinction to their names as to make themselves distinguishable from other Jews...
...We are now emerging from a period of giving Jewish boys soft names...
...One sighs over the yearning for elegance on the part of parents who pinned those names on their children...
...None of these names can lay a glove on my own favorite of all public names, that of the writer who calls herself Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D...
...Thank goodness that Europeans don't go in for middle initials, or we might have had to refer to Dante R. Alighieri, William C. Shakespeare, or Marcel G. Proust...
...George W. Bush—whose middle initial has all but become his last name—may be mildly amused to learn that only Americans go in for middle initials...
...For the same reason, Jews cannot, as certain old-family Wasps could, supply a family last name as a first name...
...If you're named Irving," I once heard a man say upon introduction to someone so named, "you must have been born in 1920...
...All Irvings were born in 1920...
...Pepper, so misunderstood...
...Steven Lee Meyers, a reporter, must have wanted to be more than just another Steve Meyers...
...I've never read any of her books—they are chiefly on marriage and sex—but I shall always revere her for her unconscious comic genius in placing Pepper and then Ph.D...
...The mothers of my own generation of Jewish boys tended to give their sons first names that were Anglo-Saxon last names: Arnold, Norman, Sheldon, Marvin, Barry...
...This might be the motive for Suzanne Jill Levine, the biographer of Manuel Puig, for there are innumerable Sue, Susan, and Suzanne Levines...
...around the name Schwartz...
...those Tylers, Travises, Zacharys, Lucs, and more Scotts than you can shake a Fitzgerald at...
...Put a definite article in front of any of these names and it sounds like a hotel...
...Occasionally, things would go awry, and the stately became comically grandiloquent...
...The philandering husband in Nora Ephron's novel Heartburn (1983) claims to have gone out with the first Jewish Kim-berly, though he doesn't, if I remember correctly, give an exact date...
...In my class lists at Northwestern, lots of Jonathans, Jeremys, Joshs, and Jaimies still turn up...
...Others, doubtless, have made fun of her name...
...How many first names go easily with, say, Blumenthal or Birnbaum I am not prepared to say, but Lance and Schuyler aren't two of them...
...Much of the pretension in naming today seems to be invested in first names: all those Whitneys, Kellys, Camerons, Brittanys, and Tiffanys...
...A tough thing to stick a kid with, an ennobling suffix...
...Apart from monarchs and popes, Americans are also alone, I believe, in using the ennobling suffix, in which one adds roman numerals to one's name, as in J. Bryan III, or George Frazier IV...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...The slightly comic oddity of many American Jewish last names makes it a bit tricky to lash up a fit first name to them...
...Goldstein Ginsburg and Pin-sky Epstein do not...
Vol. 6 • October 2000 • No. 5
