Here’s the latest batch of name-related quotes…
A name story from the recent Washington Post article “What’s in a name?” by John Kelly:
When Barbara Zigli was young, she never bothered to ask her parents why they named her Barbara. Much later, she learned that Saint Barbara is the patron saint of miners.
“My mother’s father was a coal miner, so I asked her if that was why they named me Barbara,” wrote Barbara, of Arlington.
There was a long pause, then Barbara’s mother said, “Uh, yeah, that’s it.”
Barbara was immediately suspicious. “No, really, mom,” she demanded. “Why did you name me Barbara?”
“Promise me you won’t get mad,” Barbara’s mother said. “You’re named after Miss Barbara on [the TV show] ‘Romper Room.'”
From a 2012 article about Woody Guthrie’s son Joady in the Mercury News:
Joady Guthrie was named for Tom Joad, the hero of John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” because his father, himself a political activist and an Oklahoman, or “Okie,” was sympathetic to the plight of 1930s farmers of the Great Depression. Many of Woody Guthrie’s songs championed Dust Bowl migrant workers and working people.
From the 2015 obituary of Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney in the New York Times:
Mr. Pinckney’s late mother, Theopia Stevenson Aikens, was a baseball fan who named her son after Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates All-Star, who had died in a plane crash seven months earlier while delivering aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua, family members said. His last name, one of the most storied in South Carolina politics, is that of a pair of white slaveholding cousins who signed the United States Constitution.
From a 2004 New York Times article about Denmark’s Law on Personal Names (which was originally put in place to force the Danes to use family surnames instead of patronymics):
Then in the 1960’s, a furor erupted over the first name Tessa, which resembled tisse, which means to urinate in Danish. Distressed over the lack of direction in the law, the Danish government expanded the statute to grapple with first names. Now the law is as long as an average-size book.
From a recent article in the Mirror about a woman named Abba after Swedish supergroup Abba:
When I was a child, everyone would question my name and make comments about it. They’d get confused by how it’s spelt – it’s the same as the band.
I’ve never come across anyone else named Abba and I love how unique it is. I always get asked ‘Abba like the band?’ when I say it.
For more quotes about names, check out the name quotes category.