Category: American

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Julian Street on Georgia girls’ names in 1916


Such ways as those girls have! Such voices! Such eyes! And such names, too! Names which would not fit at all into a northern setting, relatively so hard and unsentimental, but which, when one becomes accustomed to them, take their place gracefully and harmoniously[Pg 395] in the southern picture. The South likes diminutives and combinations in its women’s names. Its Harriets, Franceses, Sarahs, and Marthas, become Hatties, Fannies, Sallies and Patsies, and Patsy sometimes undergoes a further transition and becomes Passie. Moreover, where these diminutives have been passed down for several generations in a family, their origin is sometimes lost sight of, and the diminutive becomes the actual baptismal name. In one family of my acquaintance, for example, the name Passie has long been handed down from mother to daughter. The original great-grandmother Passie was christened Martha but was at first called Patsy; then, because her black mammy was also named Patsy, the daughter of the house came to be known, for purposes of differentiation, as Passie, and when she married and had a daughter of her own, the child was christened Passie. In this family the name May has more recently been adopted as a middle name, and it is customary for familiars of the youngest Passie, to address her not merely as Passie, but as Passie-May. The inclusion of the second name, in this fashion, is another custom not uncommon in the South. In Atlanta alone I heard of ladies habitually referred to as Anna-Laura, Hattie-May, Lollie-Belle, Sally-Maud, Nora-Belle, Mattie-Sue, Emma-Belle, Lottie-Belle, Susie-May, Lula-Belle, Sallie-Fannie, Hattie-Fannie, Lou-Ellen, Allie-Lou, Clara-Belle, Mary-Ella, and Hattie-Belle. Another young lady was known to her friends as Jennie-D.

—Julian Street, speaking of Georgia girls in the early 1900s, in American Adventures: A Second Trip “Abroad at Home“ (1916), ch. 18

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Brett Pelham: Your name influences your actions

One of the most bizarre demonstrations of the like-o-meter in action comes from the work of Brett Pelham, who has discovered that one’s like-o-meter is triggered by one’s own name. Whenever you see or hear a word that resembles your name, a little flash of pleasure biases you toward thinking the thing is good. So when a man named Dennis is considering a career, he ponders the possibilities: “Lawyer, doctor, banker, dentist… dentist… something about dentist just feels right.” And, in fact, people named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely than people with other names to become dentists. Men named Lawrence and women named Laurie are more likely to become lawyers. Louis and Louise are more likely to move to Louisiana or St. Louis, and George and Georgina are more likely to move to Georgia. The own-name preference even shows up in marriage records: People are slightly more likely to marry people whose names sound like their own, even if the similarity is just sharing a first initial. When Pelham presented his findings to my academic department, I was shocked to realize that most of the married people in the room illustrated his claim: Jerry and Judy, Brian and Bethany, and the winners were me, Jon, and my wife, Jayne.

The unsettling implications of Pelham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make– what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry– can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name.

—Jonathan Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)

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Baby Name Wizard allows you to see the popularity of names over time

The curve for the name "Ruth"

The Baby Name Wizard allows you to see the popularity over time of various names. We tend to think that we like names because of something intrinsic about them, but actually it’s clear that fashion rules in names as in other areas of life. Would you still name your child after your great-grandmother if her name was Gertrude instead of Emma? Ruth was one of the most popular names early in the 20th century and almost no one (it’s probably due for a new run in about ten years).

In constrast, below is a popular name  from the other end of the century. “Mason” shares the same vowel as many other names popular currently– Aaron, Aidan, Braden, Caleb, Jaden,  Jacob, Nathan, etc. and for girls Ava, Ada, Bailey, Hailey, Kayleigh, Payton, etc. (If you think they’re not popular, ask a kindergarten mother.)

The popularity of Mason is so sudden that it will most likely fall off suddenly too, as those A names become a generation indicator like “Ruth” or “Debby” or “Jennifer” or “Madison.” Wonder what’s next?

Mason is one of the top ten for boys in the U.S. right now
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Robert Francis: Names of rivers like ghosts of eagles

Like Ghosts of Eagles

The Indians have mostly gone
but not before they named the rivers
the rivers flow on
and the names of the rivers flow with them
Susquehanna   Shenandoah

The rivers are now polluted plundered
but not the names of the rivers
cool and inviolate as ever
pure as on the morning of creation
Tennessee   Tombigbee

If the rivers themselves should ever perish
I think the names will somehow somewhere hover
like ghosts of eagles
those mighty whisperers
Missouri   Mississippi

—Robert Francis (1901-1987) in Like Ghosts of Eagles (pub. 1974). Rivers often have the oldest surviving names in a landscape.

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Copper Camp: Butte, Montana names

From Introduction to Butte, the Bizarre

p 1-2

Butte boasts of suburbs called Nanny Goat Hill, Hungry Hill, Seldom Seen, Dogtown, Chicken Flats and Butchertown….Her saloons have been named The Alley Cat, Bucket of Blood, The Water Hole, Frozen Inn, Big Stope, The Cesspool, Collar and Elbow, Open-All-Night, Graveyard, The Good Old Summer Time, Pick and Shovel, The Beer Can, Saturday Night, and Pay Day.

And not only the saloons had unusual names. Skip Chute, Tipperary Mary, Colleen Bawn, Mag the Rag, Hayride, The Race Horse, Take-Five Annie, Ellen the Elephant, Kitty of Kildare, Finlander Fannie, and Little Egypt were the nicknames of hard-working waitresses at early day miners’ boarding houses….

p 3-4

It was also in Butte that a Jewish expressman, Sam Gordon, named his horse “Jesus Christ” — and did a thriving business….

Rimmer O’Neill and Sean-Soul Sullivan once did the hirin’ and firin’ at the Anaconda, while Mickey Carrol ruled the north side of the hill; …twenty-seven varieties of free lunch were supervised by Pig Nose Gaffney….In a good old-fashioned free-for-all Stuttering Alex McLean and Watermelon Burns were names to contend with. Mrs. Fitzpatrick ran the “Hog Ranch,” and the Centerville Marshall was known as “The Limb of the Law.”

Such a place was Butte, where “Colonel” Buckets, a camp roustabout, and United States Senator W.A. Clark, the copper millionaire, might often be seen walking through the streets arm in arm. Where Leu was mayor of Chinatown and never failed to become thoroughly drunk on Chinese New Year’s and St. Patrick’s Day….Where Fat Jack, the hack driver, Ike Hayes, a colored heavyweight, Jimmy July, naturalized Chinese, and Paddy the Pig, a boarding-house keeper, might be seen sitting in the same poker game.

p 5-6

A person named “Mike” might be an Irish or Serbian miner, a Greek bootblack, an Afghan tamale peddler, a Turkish coffee-house keeper, a waiter at a Chinese chop-suey joint, a “Cousin Jack” newsboy, an Austrian smelterman, a French-Canadian wood chopper, an Egyptian barber, a Polish bartender, a Syrian rug vendor, a Jewish pawnbroker or a Spanish-born resident of Crib 19, Pleasant Alley….

The notables rubbed shoulders with the street characters known as Shoestring Annie, Chicken Liz, Nigger Riley, Crazy Mary, Lutey the Box Thief, Filthy MacNabb, Lousy Pete, Crying George Rooney, The Irish Gentleman, and a score of others.

Yes, this was the “Shamrock City“…. Here the name Sullivan even today leads all others in the city directory.

p 11

Mohammed Akara, a rug peddler, had his name changed in court to Mohammed Murphy– “for business reasons.”

—From Copper Camp: The Lusty Story of Butte, Montana, the Richest Hill on Earth, by the Writers Project of Montana, 1943

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Lyle Saxon on Cajun names, circa 1945

Painting by George Rodrigue (www.georgerodrigue.com)

Curious names are popular along the bayous. Some that graced heroic characters of Greece are hereditary among the Cajuns. Hundreds of males titled Achille, Ulysse, Alcide and Télémaque now row pirogues through Louisiana waterways. There is a penchant for nicknames. Even animals have them. Every cat is “Minou,” and every child is given some diminutive of his name. It is perfectly safe to say that no group of Cajuns ever assembled without a Doucette, a Bébé, a Bootsy or a Tooti among them. At one school a family of seven children, named Thérèse, Marie, Odette, Lionel, Sebastian, Raoul, and Laurie, were known even to their teachers as Ti-ti, Rie, Dette, Tank, Bos, Mannie and La-la. It is said that every Cajun family has a member known as “Coon.” Other families, like the Polites, give their offspring names that all start with the same letter. An “E” family might be, respectively, Ernest, Eugénie, Euphémie, Enzie, Earl, Elfert, Eulalie and Eupholyte.

However, there are comparatively few family names. There are literally thousands of Landrys, Broussards, Leblancs, Bourgeoises and Breaux, these being the largest families of Acadian descent in the state.

—Lyle Saxon (1891-1946) in Gumbo Ya-Ya (pub. 1945)

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Hemingway: Only the names of places had dignity

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

—Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), A Farewell to Arms (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1929), p. 191. The speaker is the narrator, Frederick Henry.