Names
Saturday, 08 July 2023
My dad, who was bookish, wanted to call me Charlotte. My mum wanted Jane: plain monosyllabic Jane. Mum won. Jane is unshortenable. All you can do to Jane is add a Y on the end, or in the middle. I’m not keen on Janey but I’ve tried to encourage people to call me Janius. But you have to put on an Italian accent for peeps to get the joke about my superior intellect.
Perhaps as a reaction to being plain, monosyllabic Jane, I felt that our boys they needed long polysyllabic names. We chose Alexander and Sebastian. Our firstborn had plenty he could do with his name. I hoped he’d adopt Sandy. In my early teens, I’d been in love with the Sandy Arbuthnot in John Buchan’s Richard Hannay adventures but our Alexander disapproved of the name Sandy, vehemently. There wouldn’t be a Sandy in our family, not in extant generations anyway. No, boringly, he goes by the asexual Alex.
Sebastian, Seb, Batty, noted we’d been remarkably fair in naming our sons. Both brothers’ names contain the same number of letters. Sebastian isn’t enthusiastic about his name though. He doesn’t care whether people call him Sebastian or Seb but is so tired of folks not recognising either name that when he orders a coffee he says he’s Sam. Maybe being Plain Jane has a few advantages.
Posted:
08/07/2023 09:03:21 by
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