Changing Your First Name

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And speaking of Martha, I was always pretty comfortable with my name.

But I remember really clearly the first time I looked up the meaning of my name in one of those baby name books, and it said that the name Martha means ladylike.

I was horrified.

I mean, it comes from an Aramaic word that means lady or housekeeper because the story of Martha and Mary in the Bible is about Martha being industrious and very domestic.

And so I was horrified to see that my name meant ladylike because I was a tomboy and climbing trees and playing touch football with the guys in my neighborhood.

But my mother told me that it was an old-fashioned name and that it was going to come back in style someday.

And when I was born, it was the 63rd most popular name in the country, and now it’s about the 750th.

So I’m still waiting for it to come back.

But she mollified me.

I never really had much of a desire to change my own name.

Did you?

I never wanted to change my name.

I was always pleased that it was fairly uncommon.

It was never really all that common.

It kind of peaked in the 90s and kind of slid down a little bit.

But I never really wanted to change it, never cared very much.

I don’t even feel particular attraction to it.

It’s just who I am.

It’s my name.

It’s just a label, really.

But I’ve known people. There was a boy in the fifth or sixth grade whose name was Steve.

And one day he came to school and said, I want you to call me Jack.

And he decided and his mom had decided that they were going to call him Jack.

He said something about his mom, said he looked like Jack Kennedy.

And I think there might have been more to the story.

But it’s odd when somebody changes their first name around you and you have to start and restart and just kind of catch yourself saying, and when you should be saying Jack.

Right. Just interrupt that first old word.

Yeah. I have a friend who recently tried on a different name and because she had some trauma associated with her original name.

And she tried on this other name and and people were really supportive of her.

But after a few weeks, she she just decided I had to try it on to know that it didn’t fit.

That exercise actually made her go back to her original name and her memory of herself before that trauma occurred.

I knew somebody who worked in advertising with me, and her name was Polly until she decided to call herself something else.

She felt that she wasn’t being taken seriously as a Polly, P-O-L-L-Y.

And so she changed to something a little more conservative, a little more traditional, but still exceptional in a way.

So something memorable and just not like every other name.

And I think it worked for her as far as I could tell.

And I don’t know that in that environment, in that particular office, she immediately got more respect.

But I’m betting that in her whole life to come, people treated her differently with a little more respect because she wasn’t called Polly.

And we, you and I know people in common who have changed their names because of gender issues.

And that’s a whole big deal.

And sometimes folks do try on new names to see what matches the person that they’re going to be, right?

This new place that they’re finding themselves.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about it.

Did you have a name that you decided to get rid of and replace with another one?

Or did somebody close to you change their name and you’re having problems with it?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories in email to words@waywordradio.org.