Pictionary Telephone: Nomenclature

I love names. As someone who attempts to write fiction—read as: scraps a story after a few chapters because she forgot to add a villain—and comes up with pretty decent characters, naming is something I like to think I’m good at. I like when names are significant, like how in the totally addictive show “Once Upon a Time”, Cinderella’s name is Ashley (see what they did there? Ashley).

In regards to real life, the chances are that if I’ve interacted with you, I named our kids. Sorry. As a girl it’s really hard to think about what my kids’ names are going to be, since I don’t know what their last name is going to be.

As a general rule, last name determines whether or not you can use Richard as a first name.

There are also name jinxes—names I can’t ever use because of someone in my life who already has that name. If you have an alias on this blog, your real name is probably name-jinxed because you are too important/too involved in my shenanigans for me to ever want to associate another person with your name. (There are also literal name jinxes, like “everyone on the maternal side of my family named Joseph died at a tragically young age in a particularly nasty manner”. Which is really a pity, because I actually like the name Joseph.)

Besides terrible puns and off-limits names, you also have to consider that everyone in the world has a name and that some of those people are famous. This basically means that, no matter how much I love the name “Olivia”, it would be cruel to use it if the last name was “Wilde”. Same goes for “Adam” and “Smith”.

There are also names that I love but would never saddle a kid with—Keegan and Jeramie, for example. I don’t understand it when people use ridiculous spellings of normal names, and I would never do that, but for some reason I like that version better than “Jeremy”. But I would never do that because I don’t want people to think that I’m insane, and I definitely don’t want my kid to have to explain “No, it’s spelled all weird; there’s no y.”

The last place I decided to do preemptive naming was in my chemistry class. This mostly stemmed from the face that I got really sad about the fact that you can’t spell my name using elements on the periodic table. (If only there was a free M…I can get ArINa to work!)

And yes, what followed was exactly what you are thinking. I’ve decided that I’m only giving my kids names that can be spelled out with elements. That way, they won’t be as sad as I was when they’re sitting in chemistry and can’t spell their names with the periodic table. I already made a list of pretty good names.

One of these is name-jinxed in a good way, but I thought it was worth listing regardless. Images courtesy of this extremely excellent website.

Periodic table, I now have some grievances that we need to address.

1. You need the following: A, E, M, R, D, T, L. These are really common letters. I’m not sure why you don’t have them.

2. You do not need the following: Yb, Cs, Hf, Rf, Np, Sg, anything that is a consonant followed by an M, anything that begins with “Uu” (that’s right, elements 113 to 118, I’m looking at you.) There are a few others but these annoy me the most. These do not spell anything in English, ever. Especially not names.

3. It would be cool if you had the following, but I can work around it if you listen to Grievance 1: To, Le, Ll, Ia,

4. What’s the deal with your lack of Qu? And your lack of J’s? That second point totally killed like a third of my list.

Despite these obvious flaws (seriously scientists, you need to get on that and discover some new elements and name them after my blog), I managed to come up with an extensive list of names. Including names that I would never use because I am not a terrible human being.

“Oh, really?” you ask. “Well, what if you want to name your kids after iconic figures from pop culture?”

“No problem!” I say.

Meet LuCY, CaSPEr, and FRaN.

“Well, what if you marry someone who isn’t American and wants names from his heritage?”

“I got this. Their names are TiMoTeO and NArCISSe. Except they won’t have the capitalization that a thirteen-year-old who just discovered AIM would use. I was just showing which elements are involved.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to name your kids after wizards?”

“You underestimate me.”