WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20060, 29 March 1927, Page 13

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Apparently names enjoy modes, just like dresses and shoes and hats. Often they dale their owners as surely as a bustle or a hobble skirt. Babies unfortunate enough to be born during the war and christened with “war’’ names carry this indelible stamp—not that the date matters as much as the name in this case. I can sympathise with the little boy who, having been christened Kitchener Allenby Anzac, and being just an ordinary, freckled, cheery little Australian, notified his pals that he preferred to be called “jus’ Bill.” In the same way a girl with a name which lias obviously been culled from some cheap novelette, the choice of a scatter-brained, unthinking mother, must iong, when asked her name—then to rer.eat it, and perhaps spell it—to be called plain, unvarnished Mary Ann. Shakespeare said: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” and there is no gainsaying that; but walk up to » gardener, and call his favourite bloom a badger or a wombat, and see what sort of a reception you get. More and more, as I come into contact, in fact, and fiction, with the contorted, fantastic named of stageland and the silver sheet, I wonder that they are being allowed to usury the place of the oldfashioned names, which are undeniably sweet and gracious, and have such dignity. They have, too, some suggestion of nationality, of historic interest. But many of them have been so held up to jest and ridicule, so parodied in song of the cheaper order, that all sense of their intrinsic beauty is lost in the mists of time. It seems to me that it would be more fitting if comedians allotted a spell to the grand old names and gave the new-fangled inventions a fling. Boiled down, it’s all a matter of that bugbear, public opinion. Your girl would hate to he called Sarah, but might nos object to Clara at all. Certainly she would not mind Vera, yet all three rhyme. Then take Germaine, and Jane. Perhaps one should not bring foreign names into the discussion. But I do it to prove that Jane is really a sweetly-sounding name, full of euphony. I can never discover why women try to conceal the fact that their names are Jane, Janet, or Jennifer. The much-abused Bridget, Ellen, Rose, Elizabeth, Dorcas, Anne, Mary gain quite a lot in prestige when you say them over softly and melodiously, instead of bleating them after the manner of the dame in the pantomime. I like “movies’’ and plays, and some of the modern novels as well, but I’d rather bo called Philippa than Dusk, Dorothy than Fritzi, Helen than Mae. I always bear my parents a lasting gratitude when I reflect that they harped back to Saxon and biblical anecdote for my own names, and I think our own daughters, in time to come, will thank us if we “go and do likewise.”