What’s in a name?

It is of course very rude to make fun of people’s names. Yet I will admit to falling off my chair again and again when I first read Peter Bowler’s The Annotated Onomasticon some twenty years ago, partly because one of my favourite SBHS Old Boys, whom I actually saw in the 1950s, Rear Admiral Sir Leighton Bracegirdle, is in it, along with classics such as the Reverend Canaan Banana, one-time President of Zimbabwe, the Philippines’s excellent Cardinal Sin, and a woman called Desiree Tits, not to mention the family Treblecock, pronounced Trebilko. It is that kind of book…

I did teach an unfortunate and singularly unbright lad named Peter Abbott once. Say the name quickly… And then there was Helen Burn, an open invitation to punning. And, unfortunate in Sydney in the 1960s, Callan Parkin.

Chinese people for one reason or another often give themselves a non-Chinese name, or their parents may. There are many reasons for this, not least being a reluctance to use a name which in China only one’s closest and dearest would ever use. M, for example, would have been Xiao Xu to older people or friends, and no doubt now is Lao Xu to some of the youngsters: Xiao= “little” or “young”; “Lao” = “old”; only some would have used his given name, which does begin with M as does his English name.

Sometimes the choice of English name strikes us as quite odd. I did know a “Cloudy”, and presume that translated his Chinese name. At the moment I am tutoring a “Hades”. That one is so odd — he is late teens or 20-something — I did ask him if he knew what it meant… He did.

Some Chinese in the recent past were named in much the same spirit as the Puritans of the 17th century in England or New England — Preserved Fyshh comes to mind; so I do know one “Red Victory”, for example, and I have heard of a “Smash the British” which apparently dates from the Great Leap Forward. Then there are other more poetic names: I had a coachee last year named “Autumn” because she was born in Autumn. There is also a character of that name in Nicholas Jose’s novel Avenue of Eternal Peace. Indeed M’s own Chinese name has a similar explanation, his mother having been it appears more poetic than political, even in 1960s Shanghai.

In 1981 I encountered my very first Korean student; seeing his name in the roll I asked, “Chong: what do you call yourself?” He smiled and replied “Trevor”, or something… His name in fact is not uncommon in Korea: Yu Suk. Years later in another place I had an adult Korean student named Bum, again not uncommon. Whereas many take on an English name of convenience, he hadn’t. We (colleagues and I) did try while avoiding any loss of face on his part to suggest he might think about this, but to his credit he said quite firmly that Bum was his name and if other people had a problem with that… So Bum he stayed. I should mention to US readers that Bum is even more awkward in an Australian or British context than it might be in America.