Meaning of Names

It would be self serving to quote Shakespeare and talk about roses or analyze the greek (sometimes latin) root of words. The latter I leave to spelling bee geeks and champions.

It’s just I find myself in sideways building hurtling through space at hundreds of miles and hour in a system no one truly understands and that is more likely to fail than to succeed. Planes…hmpf!

I’m on my way to sandy beaches, sand sculptures of the Virgen de Guadalupe and whole Fish deep fried with garlic and spice. A place where the Marimba plays in the town square, where rules are lax but the laws exist. It’s a beautiful place corrupted by its residents. It’s a Utopia gone wild. Like a well maintained pond invaded by the Asian Carp.

But the problem here is names – of things, of people, of places of time and thought.

It comes to mind that the movie Jaws would sound silly in Spanish. That a movie called 12 monkeys would sound like a terror flick in German. Maybe it’s just that the expression for kiss in French also has darker and dangerous implications.

And you wake up one morning from the comfortable unconscious that is every memoery before the age of 5 and realize that you have a name – a meaningful one. But so do dogs that are pets and ficticious characters impersonated by an enthusiastic fan at a football stadium. You either like your name or you don’t. You either have a middle name that you will hide from the world, use in a I-have-a-name-but-go-by-JC,JP,LT,etc Maybe it’s a silent tribute your parents decided upon in memory of a distant aunt you’ll never meet or a name your mother read in a magazine while she waited at the beauty salon one time.

I look out the window and I see the ocean.

Tuesday was named Tuesday because that was the day it was rescued.

Buck took the nickname (yet another confounding variable in this study) of “you big ugly beast you”.

And a nice homeless man baptized every man he met, by the mere effect of calling out to them, Jack.

So what do they mean and do they shape us? I’m working on a list organized by names with a map of traits and character strengths and weaknesses in search of a pattern. I’m looking for a revelation that’s a needle in a haystack.

La-sha.