Oct 09, 2012 21:33
Yes, that's from the random topic generator.
It made me think of two things. Maybe three. First, I love Ursula K. LeGuin (speaking of names... hers and Zilpha Keatly Snyder's are among the best author names ever) but one part of Dispossessed that freaked me out when I read it (much as Marge Piercy's snicking of the tie -- the umbilical cord in fact -- between women and gestation did, in Women on the Edge of Time, when I first read it) was that babies on Anarres were named by randomly generated computer lists. That seems to be taking the lack of possessions a little too far. All of Anarres' elimination of personal possessions felt like that to me, in fact, but a name! Yikes!
Second, my own naming, and my sister's, and now that I am using Ancestry.com, all of those other centuries of names, too. So far I am the only person with my own name (which should tell you how uncommon it is) and there are only a couple of the male version of it, in twenty-some generations, that I've seen at any rate. There are not all that many ancestors with my sister's name either, though hers is much more common. My father chose both our names. My mother doesn't seem to have had anything to do with the choice, which seems weird. He picked them both after seeing -- and liking the actresses in -- certain movies that were in the theaters when we were born, or not long before. But he must have liked the character names, because he didn't give us the actresses' names. Anyway, both of us like our names. Our middle names are both from women on his side of the family, much more ordinary names, and both of them are reflected several times in his mother's family.
Finally, ... what was the third thing? About names? Oh, I guess if I ever got the chance. That seems hardly likely now, but I've always liked Irish names. A girl would most likely be Maeve, surprise, surprise, though I like Roisin, also (pronounced Ro-sheen). Which is pretty much Rosa. And a boy? Possibly Liam, or Dermot, or Devlin like my kitten. Who is sleeping between my arms right now, her head warming my right forearm.
personal history,
meme