Names function to distinguish, to categorize, that is, to limit the referential power of persons, places, and things. For example, “home,” is a very dissimilar signifier, than is “234 Dusseldorf Avenue;” “Cave of the Machpelah” is incredibly unlike “outpost” and “clothes dryer” diverges enormously from “Mechanism for Funding our Repairman’s Next Vacation.”

Names not only distinguish specific cases from generalized examples and stand in for universals. In computer science, for instance, singular designations are given to entire sets of messages to save code creators the need to tediously reconstruct many lines of data each time those creators allude to a distinct function.

Sometimes names shield identities, i.e. separate public and private characteristics, as exemplified by writers’ pen names, or by the pseudonyms. Other times, monikers are meant to relay information to the public. For instance, while a kingdom might be well inhabited, only one resident is titularly “His Excellency.”

In the bigger world, we have “Associate Professors in Chemistry” and “sales associates.” In romance, we have “snuggle-umpkins” and “that-fatuous-person-who-wouldn’t-go-on-more-than-two-shidduch-dates.” Our children, depending on our available memory cells and on the rate at which they create chaos in our homestead are: “Hey You,” “Fruit of My Loins,” or “The-Miscreant-Who-Hid-the-Lizard-in the-Dryer.”

Essentially, names help us, as dictated by collective sensibilities, cope with “semantic interoperability,” with getting beyond the confusion that arises when a message’s recipient doesn’t get the gist intended by a message’s source. Beyond bridging incommensurabilities, names can also function as semantic projectiles used to convey sentiment.

by KJ Hannah Greenberg
Jerusalem, Israel
This piece is excerpted from a larger essay formerly posted by The Jerusalem Post in “Old/New World Discourse.”

In front of the rabbi’s
Old Chevrolet station wagon
They saw engraved words on
The wall. They were the words
Of a minor prophet, a disciple
Of Isaiah’s, they later discovered,
A proponent of peace and ‘Walking
Humbly with your God’…they liked
The way the vowels rolled simply
Off the tongue—Little did they realize?
The annoyance, mispronunciations
And taunting that would follow
Later, there was a Bar Mitzvah and
My namesake’s identity came up
Again and I spoke to his philosophy
To the best of my abilities as if I were
Supposed to be an embodiment—
Outside of the synagogue, it was a
Different story, non-Jewish friends,
Teachers, librarians, strangers
Wanted to call me Mike, Michael,
Mikhail, Mick, anything but the two syllable
Sound that seemed so simple to me
When kids took Earth Science
In junior high, they learned of
Its’ other definitions—
I was the shiny crystalline stuff
They saw embedded in the sidewalk
Or the stuff they sprayed in their shoes
To ward off foot fungus
Either way, they would step on the shiny sparkles
That were me and laugh
Until I would openly smirk or grimace—
Upon reading this tale, someone would
Play me a miniature violin
Of melancholy and point a finger,
Yet, to this very day, people want to say
My name, no matter how obscure or popular
It might get, something other than what it is
Even my friend, Abdullah, and his name
Is Abdullah, and you would think he’d have
No excuse but to learn, calls me Mike no
Matter how often I correct him—

by Micah Zevin
Bronx, NY

My Polish last name is ten letters long. My Midwestern family has always pronounced it “jake-uh-bow-ski,” stressing the first and third syllables. Naturally, to me, it has been a simple, four-syllable name, as easy to say as Oppenheimer or O’Shaughnessy. Yet for others it’s been one of “those” names, as odd as Lipizanner, or worse, Blagojevich.

People forced to pronounce my name for the first time often give up after the first two syllables. Sometimes they pretend to stutter, saying, “Jakka, uh, Jakku, uh?” as if trying to remember the lyrics to a James Brown song. Or they try to stare my name to verbal life from the roster or clipboard in their hand waiting until the owner of this jacked-up last name chimes in to save them. Then upon being told, “It’s jake-uh-bow-ski,” people smile, saying with false sweetness, “Oh, of course,” before continuing down the list toward their next victim, usually a kindred spirit of mine with one of “those” names from China, or worse, India.

In the sixth grade, my name spawned the utterly stupid insult: Jack-off-a-bow-ski. It was a poor botched insult with a verb smooshed in there. The moniker was, in fact, so dumb that the kids who called me that quit it the same week they started. Maybe because it was too hard to say? Or maybe because they knew that they had not struck upon anything hurtfully cool. They seemed to understand that when you jacked-up someone’s name the result needed to be a short wicked-sweet noun or adjective full of meanness, like calling Heather heifer or Bobby blobby. It made no sense to waste a lot of breath on, “Here comes that Polish dork Matt Jack-off-a-bow-ski” when you could just yell, “Hey, watch out for blobby.”

My first week in college a professor doing roll call called me Matthew “Yah-ku-bov-ski.” I replied, “Actually, sir, it’s Jake-uh-bow-ski.” He said, “Actually, it’s Ya-ku-bov-ski.” I laughed. He was right after all. Why had I been making my name easier to say all these years? His way was a lot more fun. And being a professor, he sure knew how to make it sound harder than it really was.

So now, I can be Matt Yahkubovski, and if I introduce myself thus, you know I’ve either been drinking, or I think you look sympathetic to Polish nationals, or both. However people say it, I’m now content with my name’s odd power, and I revel quietly in the jacked-up-ed-ness it brings to the party.

by Matthew Jakubowski
Philadelphia, PA

“Where is Corisa, short and Stoudt?” sang the counselor.

It was Summer Fun camp and I froze: mostly from the shock that until that moment no one besides me had thought of this mocking. It didn’t help that I was a Haole living in Hawaii which automatically made me not the shortest but definitely the largest student in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and at the time of this incident, 6th grade. I walked, head-down-compromising-smile, to my place in the morning line-up.

Stoudt was my dad’s last name (technically, my stepfather). It took 10 years for the school board to realize I had been living under a false identity. I remember it felt strange to be accused of this, as though we weren’t a family and had been lying. I had the choice of switching to my biological father’s name or having my present dad adopt me. No problem, dad said and he filed the paperwork. However, the other man involved refused to “give up” the children he had not seen for a decade.

“I’m changing my last name,” I told the boy I had a crush on – I don’t remember his name.

“What, are you getting married?”

I laughed and it felt good not to be a child bride only the product of divorce and remarriage.

Not much later my family moved to California. I was now in 8th grade shifting from one foot to the other in my polyester gym shorts and baggy white t-shirt outside the PE teacher’s office. Three Cholas walked by. The peaks of their bangs stood at least four inches high. I’d never seen anything like it. We didn’t have Cholas in Hawaii. They wore thick make-up on eyes and on lips and snug revealing jeans. Signs of a world I had yet to discover were tracked by the bruises on their necks. I was in awe.

“Corisa, what’s your last name?” the gym teacher asked trying to find me on the roster.

“Moreno.” The syllabus came out weakly.

The Cholas heard me. They stopped and had to ask, perhaps because of my poorly coiffed hair. “Mo-re-no. Are you Mexican?”

“My father’s Mexican,” I said. These are my people? I thought.

*

Amongst other things, it took studying Spanish and learning to dance Salsa for me to grow into my inner Latina, but really, I’ll always be a little Stoudt. The carnitas help with that.

by Corisa Moreno
Oakland, CA

A double-yellow line
means one thing
when you’re driving
on this side of the border,

but another
when you’re the passenger,
your hands lying
uselessly in your lap

and the bored children
in the back seat foolishly
insisting on asking,
as the road turns north

and then disappears
among the barbwire trees,
why you named them
for people who were dead.

by Howie Good
Highland, NY