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The Name Game
Nov. 1st, 2008 12:39 amFor the purpose of explaining "Why Charlie?," a vignette:
So I was talking to my mom last night, and without letting on why I was asking inquired as to what she would have named me if I had been a boy. She promptly replied that I would have had my brother's name, and he would have had a family name that doesn't really suit either of us. So then I got her to retell the story of why my birth name is what it is. These are stories my mom tells over and over, and loves to tell, so there's nothing odd about me calling her at ten o'clock at night to ask about names. She starts in telling the story, and gets to the bit where she wanted to name me Charlotte, and we talk about her reasoning there and everything. (Charlotte was her favorite cousin growing up, she was sort of a family black sheep and my grandparents did not want me named after her.) So my mother continues and as usual concludes that there's no special familial reason why they picked my birth name, they just liked it.
Now, my birth name and my mom's name start with the same letter, and when I shortened my name to go by my first initial she thought that was really cool and did it too. I decided that I didn't want to play around with the same set of initials, because my mother would unintentionally make me crazy over it. But I could take the name she'd wanted in the first place and use the masculine version of that, which gets me Charlie. So there we go.
So I was talking to my mom last night, and without letting on why I was asking inquired as to what she would have named me if I had been a boy. She promptly replied that I would have had my brother's name, and he would have had a family name that doesn't really suit either of us. So then I got her to retell the story of why my birth name is what it is. These are stories my mom tells over and over, and loves to tell, so there's nothing odd about me calling her at ten o'clock at night to ask about names. She starts in telling the story, and gets to the bit where she wanted to name me Charlotte, and we talk about her reasoning there and everything. (Charlotte was her favorite cousin growing up, she was sort of a family black sheep and my grandparents did not want me named after her.) So my mother continues and as usual concludes that there's no special familial reason why they picked my birth name, they just liked it.
Now, my birth name and my mom's name start with the same letter, and when I shortened my name to go by my first initial she thought that was really cool and did it too. I decided that I didn't want to play around with the same set of initials, because my mother would unintentionally make me crazy over it. But I could take the name she'd wanted in the first place and use the masculine version of that, which gets me Charlie. So there we go.
