Justin Spotts
It was the name that started my collection of names that make you tilt your head little bit and ask yourself, “What were the parents thinking?”
I was working at a little postal station in Chicago, and I noticed the name on the package that a customer had just given me. “Justin Spotts.” Each name sounded fine just by itself. Justin is a perfectly respectable name, and I’d heard the last name of Spotts before, but the two together constituted more of a phrase than a name.
Q: Is it raining? A: Justin Spotts
Q: Is this shirt stained? A: Justin Spotts
Holiday Names
In November of that year, I saw another package with a head scratcher: “Dwight Christmas.” This is where I feel I have to say, really, I am not making this up. If you had an unusual last name like Christmas, could you really live with yourself if you named your child Dwight? Did they name his sister Mary?
One of my recent co-workers was named Holly Noel. She seemed to be fine with the name, and I would have to say it was easy for all of us to remember. She later switched her last name to her married name, and I always felt she lost a little something with a name like “Holly Smith.”
I came across another winter-themed name when I worked for an apartment complex in Chicago. On my first day, I was looking through the accounts and came across the name of the resident in 2B. Jack Frost. I had to wonder if perhaps had just given the landlord a fake name. But the name seemed fitting when later that winter the boiler was out in the complex for five days. With the temperature bottoming out at five below zero, everyone got a little bit of window decoration from Jack Frost.
She Should Be in the Band, Not the Legislature
When I was in high school, a new girl moved to town. Her last name was Rock and her first name was Ginette, but she went by the nickname Gigi. Gigi Rock. How cool is that? In a fair universe, she would’ve picked up an electric guitar and joined a girl band. Instead, she married and became a state representative with the much more dignified name of Ginette Dennis. It didn’t have the same ring at all.
Some Names Are Just Plain Cruel
Texas bigwigs Sally and James Hogg were either completely clueless or they had a bit of a mean streak because they name their daughter Ima. They claimed she was named after the character in an epic poem that her uncle wrote but, really, couldn’t they see that they shouldn’t really burden their daughter with the name Ima Hogg? If you Google her, you can see that she was an attractive and accomplished woman, dubbed “The First Lady of Texas.” You also find out that she did her best to avoid her unusual name, signing simply I. Hogg, or just ensuring that her signature was completely illegible.
Perhaps rock stars shouldn’t be held to any standards when it comes to naming their children, but you have to think Frank Zappa was in an altered state of consciousness when he decided to name his children Dweezil and Moon Unit. Perhaps he was ensuring that they would have to follow musical career. It would be a little tough call up your accountant, Dweezil, or look over the plans from your new architect, Moon Unit.
Hey, I Had the Name Before It Was Famous
My maiden name was Schroeder, and I learned to smile and nod at jokes about whether I liked to play piano (an oh-so-witty reference to the Peanuts character), or questions about whether I was related to Colorado’s congresswoman at the time, Pat Schroeder. But that was small potatoes next to the comments that my college roommate’s father must have faced. His name was Charles Brown and, yes, he went by Charlie.
Or imagine living life with the name, Sally Field, a woman I came across on an alumni list at the college where I worked. How many times do you think people quipped to her, “You like me, you really like me”?
Just Part of My Job
My sister told me that one of the people she corresponds with for her job is a fellow named Troy Harder. Yes, he’s a coach. When I hear that name, I picture Hagrid, the affable giant in the Harry Potter books talking in his charming roughhewn accent, “Yes, perfessor Dumbledore, we wanted him to get ahead in life, so we gave him the name of Troy Harder.”
When I was working at a dead-end job (“the pay is lousy, but the hours are bad”), I came across the name of just the person who could help me, Dr. Conrad Hyers. I wondered if he would take me on the spot, or if I’d have to send him a resume first.
What’s in a Nickname?
I taught college composition for a time, and I always tried told them to let me know if they had a nickname, or preferred form of their name. One young blonde fresh-faced woman requested that I call her by the name “Sunshine.” I like the vibe of the 60s, but I did have trouble feeling like an authority figure when I’d say, “Sunshine has a good point. What is the nature of the epistemological reality of the first paragraph?”
My husband, who is a humanities professor, had a young man in his class who wanted to be called by the name, “Ducky.” To my husband’s credit, he resisted the urge to say, “Now see here Ducky, we aren’t going to use such disruptive names in this classroom.”
Names That Sound like Nicknames
At a theater gathering, a woman in the crowd shook my hand and said, “I’m Short.” I didn’t know what to say. She was a bit on the short and stocky side. She also talked in a brief and clipped manner a little… short, if you will. “It’s not a nickname,” she told me. “It’s the name my parents gave me.”
Some Kids Don’t Know How Lucky They Are
For every child settled with the wacky name, there are dozens who don’t know how close they came. Parents can get a little loopy sometimes come up with some humdingers that they discard in saner times.
A friend of mine had the last name of Silva, and since they were football fans I started brainstorming names of popular Denver Broncos. There was Shannon Sharpe, which I always thought it was a cool name because it was… Sharpe…and his brother Sterling. I said the name, “Sterling Silva,” then realized how it sounded. My friend rolled her eyes, and I dropped the suggestion.
But I’ve heard plenty of others. The couple with the last name of “Plane” couple who joked they would name their child Hopper. The Still family who said they were considering the name Stan for a son. The Bumps (yes, their last name was “Bump”) who told us they would name their child Speed. Fortunately for the children, their parents were kidding. Unlike Sallie and James Hogg, these couples decided not to consign their children to a lifetime avoiding their full names and obscuring their signatures.
Shakespeare famously wrote, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But would Romeo have pledged his troth to a girl named Juliet Ima Hogg? Perhaps the whole tragedy could have been avoided.