Readers have asked me why I have two chapters in the book "Writing Tools" devoted to names.
Tool #14 (click on the link to listen to the podcast version) reminds reporters to "get the name of the dog." And Tool #15 encourages all writers to "pay attention to names."
Names always mean something, even if we can't figure out what. For fun, I like to play with the deeper meanings of my three names:
Roy derives from the French word for "king";
Peter, as we know from Gospel accounts, means "rock"; and
Clark derives from "clerk" and "cleric," a person who in the Middle Ages could read and write. Translated by etymology, then, I am:
King Rock Writer.
Born near Naples, Italy, my grandfather was Pelegrino Marino. Wouldn't you love to write a story about a character with such a poetic name? In addition to the lovely rhyme, the words translate as
Pilgrim Mariner, not bad for a boy who was to travel by boat to America when he was just four years old.
In my own recent travels, I came across a 1997 book titled "
The Language of Names: What We Call Ourselves and Why It Matters," written by Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays. Here are some of the more interesting
chapter titles: American Adam; Names in the Melting Pot; City of Names; A Boy Named Sue and Others; Maiden Names; Literary Names: The Importance of Being Sherlock.
Along with countless interesting stories about names, Mr. Kaplan and the saucy Ms. Bernays provide us with a rich cultural context for writers' fascination with names. They quote Sigmund Freud from "Totem and Taboo": "A human being's name is a principal components in his person, perhaps a piece of his soul."
This paragraph sealed the deal:
Names are what anthropologists call cultural universals. Apparently there has never been a society able to get along without them. They are among the first things we ask or learn when we meet someone new, and we use them to form immediate but often unreliable conclusions about personality and ethnicity. Names shape the language of the daily drama of gesture, avowal, and inference that is part of our social life. Full personal names, first and last taken together, stand at the intersection of opposing pulls: they set the bearer apart as an individual but also provide the bearer with family and extended kinship ties, and so focus both the present and the past. And beyond this, they have an occult associative and symbolic power. They are charms.
And charming.
So get the name, not only of the person, but the dog and cat, the flower on the windowsill, the street behind the house, the village, the founder of the town.
Andy and Alex: Thanks for adding your thoughts to this...
