What’s in a Name, Anyway?

As I glanced through an early holiday gift catalog while eating my turkey soup today, a headline caught my eye. It read, “Names are key to gifts that endure.”

The headline hit a sore spot for me, as I’d just returned from opening a new bank account, and as usual, the paperwork couldn’t seem to get my name straight. It has been the story of all my years thus far that my name has always been mispronounced or misspelled. From childhood, people mispronounced my first name, Cara, and they usually misspelled it as well. Of course, my ethnic last name (Transtrom) apparently is even worse than Cara, as it was mangled in both print and pronunciation so often that I learned to answer to any set of sounds that seemed even vaguely familiar.

I guess I grew accustomed to the idea that my name was too difficult for most folks, and that it really wasn’t worth my time or effort to correct either the spelling or pronunciation errors because it was like shoveling snow in a snowstorm: it’d just happen again and again, anyway. As I mentioned before, I learned early on to answer to whatever manglement seemed like it could have been intended as my name. And indeed, sometimes it was a definite stretch….

But I am slowly learning that names do matter. And with this realization has come the awareness that my name matters because I matter. This may sound rather arrogant, but I’ll try to explain what I mean by the term “I matter.” When I meet other people for the first time, do I attempt a good-faith effort to understand their name and to pronounce it correctly? I surely do. Perhaps I try even harder because I know how it is to have 75% of the population mispronouncing your name most of the time. In short, it matters a lot to me to get their name right because I am telling them, in however an indirect way it might seem, that it matters to me to get their handle right because they matter.

I am reminded of that famous Shakespearian quote contained within that memorable scene from the wonderful Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet asks herself, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet….” My memory is a bit foggy, but I seem to recall asserting myself with great authority (in a conversation with myself, no less!) to the effect that certainly names mattered. “After all,” Cara A said indignantly to Cara B, who was languorously observing the conversation with little interest, “can you imagine a rose named skunk? Noooooo….a rose would not smell as sweet by any other name!”

And so the matter has rested until this day, when I realized something that Cara A just may have forgotten the first time around in this discussion: that names take on the personality/meaning/power/character/attributes of the one named. This would mean that if indeed the term skunk had been chosen to be the rose’s moniker, today the word skunk would have beautiful, romantic, gorgeously fragrant undertones. This also means that had the malodorous animal currently known as the skunk been originally christened “rose,” the term rose would today have rather universally negative associations.

It is true that I cannot control what set of sounds people may utter when attempting to get a handle on my name, and it is also true that the way in which others refer to me may indeed help to shape the opinion many people will eventually have of me. But it is also true that I can choose to fully inhabit my name in such a way that over time my personality will help to shape the associations surrounding my name in a positive way.

The above platitude is small comfort when I am once again asked if my name is pronounced Trainwreck, or Trainstorm, or Tsara, or Karen, or what have you. But it is, in fact, a small reminder that even though others may often mangle the sounds of my name, only I can mangle the meaning and associations that my name will come to represent both to myself and to others.

“What’s in a name?” Well, perhaps a lot more than I would have first imagined.