Calling Names: What’s the dog’s name? You might be asked; and you might answer, I have no idea, but we call it Mutt.
Names are usually almost meaningless, but not quite. Sometimes they imply meanings by echoing other words. Sometimes they conflate meanings by the co-incidental marriage of their different elements. Sometimes they sound like actual words, but ones that we haven’t heard before. Sometimes they seem to be distorted versions of words that we know. Sometimes they are perfectly simple words from languages that we have forgotten, or not yet encountered.
Names are hygrospic of meaning. They draw it to themselves. Even randomly chosen names, plucked blindfolded from a telephone directory or voting register, seem to take on the the qualities of the characters to whom they are attached, or vice-versa. I’m writing about writing of course, and about the fictional characters we create, and how we identify them; but it all seems to be true of real life too!
A wartime friend of my father’s was known to his comrades as Blackie, to his first wife as Vin, and to his second as Mel. His passport would have recorded him as a Melvin. He was the inspiration for Derek Fitton, the protagonist in my novel, A Penny Spitfire. Derek is known variously, as Dec, and Dirk. These changes mark out the trajectories of real, and of fictional lives, as BHD and Me well know.
I was adopted into a Strickland family, on my mother’s side. They could trace their roots from the midlands, where I was born and grew up, back to the north of England, in what is now Cumbria. Stricklands were, and I believe still are, rare in the midlands, but in Cumbria they were a landed family ‘of Sizergh’. A Hornihand-Strickland was one of the seven men of Moidart, who welcomed Charles Stuart in his ill-fated 1745 to seize the crown of the Union. Strickland is a corruption of Stirkelond, a patronym of Dutch origin, brought into Scotland in, I believe, the fifteen hundreds, where it left the word ‘stirk’. Herd (and herded) in the border country, it was not a word in currency in the midlands where I grew up. Stirk isn’t in my edition of the OED, but went on to be steer, I shouldn’t wonder, when the Scots took cattle ranching across to the USA. Dogies and Spreidhs, and other such Scottish cattle culture words can be found in Rob Gibson’s Plaids and Bandanas, one of a whole genre of books about the Highlanders, in which some interesting origins of English words (also not in my OED) can be found.
Another name from my childhood was Hole, a surname deed-poll-changed by its owner to De Laney, which implies a story all on its own. If names work by suggestion, subtley influencing the reader’s reaction to characters, and to stories, they must also operate on the subconscious of the writer. They evoke associations we are not conscioulsy aware of. I recently wrote a story with a protagonist called Wynwright. I was well aware that the name was a slightly skewed version of the more common ‘Wainright’, and that it held elements that sounded like ‘win’ and ‘right’, but I had entirely overlooked the famous writer of mountain guides. Yet, the story begins with my character putting on his walking boots! I often recall that opening line of Moby Dick: Call me Ishmael, but I can’t remember any other mention of the name throughout that long novel. Stories are often named after their heroes, or villains, and have been since antiquity, for the Greeks gave us the word for the practice: eponymous.
Surprisingly perhaps, the absence of names can be as potent as their presence. Without names we have to find some other way of identifying our characters: labels, in effect. My Wynwright interacts with a character described as ‘the man’, or ‘the stranger’. In another story I have ‘the peanut headed man’. In this story the four central characters exchange names – though the reader does not hear them all, and the protagonist, who is named, resents the cultural imperialism of being subjected to the practice. In Lord of the Rings, the rather formal Peregrine (from peregrination, a circular journey, there and back again) and Meriadoc, are reduced to Pippin (a type of apple), and Merry (a state of mind valued more for its innocence that its intelligence). In a section I couldn’t track down to cite, I seem to recall, perhaps Gandalf, saying how he would hate to see the hobbitry subject to tyranny – but the adjectives he usesto describe that hobbitry are astonishingly patronising.
I remember a Rhodesian who had fled his homeland, losing almost all his possessions, in the late nineteen seventies. Telling me of his ‘bleks’, he asserted that they were ‘like children’. So they may have been, but that ought not to have been so, and if they were, must surely have been the consequence of the regimes under which they were living, and had lived. In the movies too, labels tell us as much about the labeller as about the labellee: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly springs to mind. Names are a seque away from masks and cloaks, uniforms and badges, whether or not you are a caped crusader. Black hats, and white hats, verbal or visual, explicit or implicit, give off the atmosphere of character, and of story in just the same way as the events that have taken place in a house are said to give off theirs. They manipulate the way we enter, and the carefree or cautious way we move through it.
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24/07/2012 at 10:19 am
Christine Howe
Your post stirred up some of the periodic guilt I feel on naming my characters. My homely earth-mother types are often Pauline and posh blokes, Gerald. And it’s too easy to call older women Doris or Ethel. I feel as if I stereotype my characters. One day I’ll create a vamp and call her Pauline, but then it might turn out to be a funny story and wouldn’t that be just as bad? Apologies to all the Paulines out there.
The stirring up continued when I read about the wartime friend of your father. After my father’s death I discovered a postcard sent to him, in wartime, on which he was addressed by a nickname, new to me and suggesting an aspect of his personality I’d never discovered. It surprised me and made me want to ask questions. That’s a story I can’t even make guesses about, but I could invent it…
24/07/2012 at 5:14 pm
bhdandme
Your point about unknown names unexpectedly revealed is a powerful one, and begs a whole slew of stories!
25/07/2012 at 9:19 pm
gold price
The novel has its own soundtrack. What’s the story behind how this happened? I was at the Ironwood saloon in Calgary with Don Robinson, the head of sales for Penguin. We were listening to Tom Phillips and his band The Men of Constant Sorrow play their urban honky-tonk tunes. I know Tom and I’d seen him perform on stage in the role of Hank Williams. Tom is an accomplished singer-songwriter with several country CDs out. His music has an Old School roots country feel, which is exactly the music of my novel. I leaned over and said to Don, “If Spanish Fly had a soundtrack, it would be by Tom Phillips.” We talked about it, about how movies have soundtracks but novels don’t. Don said, “Let’s catch Tom between sets and talk to him about it.” The result is something that’s never been done before: an original music CD with songs based on the characters, story and themes of the novel. I even wrote the lyrics to few of the songs, which Tom put to music and performed along with his own. It was incredibly cool.
26/07/2012 at 12:18 am
darkhorsepictures
During a troublesome dream, I found myself at the base of a cliff, on a beach with two dark shapes. After a while I asked one of the shapes what we were waiting for.
‘We’re waiting for Icthius,’ it said.
…
I always thought there was enough mystery in that name to hew a character from. After all, nomen est omen.
06/08/2012 at 2:33 pm
Mick North
If you’ve got a humble library card, you can access the entire OED online, and much of their reference material – just use the card number to log in. Then you could have a look in the Dictionary of British Place Names and discover that Stricklands Great and Little, in Cumbria, derive from “Stircland late 12th cent. ‘Cultivated land where young bullocks are kept’. OE stirc + land.” – although, they’re guilty of confusing their bullocks and their heifers, so why should we believe anything else they say?