Hortatory Names

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.

We got an email from a listener named Susan who wrote,

While climbing up my family tree, I found the given name hate-evil.

What would one call that kind of name?

I’m assuming they were Puritans.

And Grant, it turns out that there were indeed Puritans who went by the first name hate-evil.

It’s just like it sounds, a combination of hate and evil.

And there is a term for this kind of name.

It’s called a hortatory name.

Hortatory.

Hortatory.

It’s from the Latin for encourage or urge.

And these hortatory names were given to children as a way of exhorting them to live up to that quality.

So, for example, there were little Puritan babies with these names, these hyphenated names like be courteous, search the scriptures, sorry for sin, and fight the good fight of faith.

That is far beyond patience, hope, charity, and so forth, right?

Isn’t it?

And those were the exceptions.

I mean, most of them in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, the vast majority of them had names like Sarah and Elizabeth and Mary and John and Joseph.

But then you had the occasional abstinence, comfort, deliverance, increase and humiliation.

That’s a humble name, right?

Increase Mather. We all know increase, right?

Yeah, right. It’s kind of odd, isn’t it? And the list goes on and on. There was at least one child named Wrestling.

Wait, like arm wrestling?

I’m thinking it’s wrestling between good and evil.

Very good, yes.

Wrestling with big questions.

And then another one named Thanks.

Can you imagine?

Thanks grows up in your city.

I’m sitting here going, what are the nicknames to these people?

Hate Evil?

Do they just call her Haiti?

Yeah.

Or Hattie?

Something like that?

Or Hey Thanks.

Would you hand me that?

Thanks.

Thanks.

Oh, my.

I bet they went by their middle names, every one of them.

A friend of mine here in San Diego recently had a brand new beautiful baby girl,

And he named her, well, her middle name is Paley Girl.

The Spanish word for danger.

So her middle name is literally danger.

Whoa.

And I was thinking that was odd.

Well, sometimes they were middle names.

Sometimes they had big, huge middle names,

Like if Christ had not died for thee, thou hast been damned.

That’s a middle name.

Yeah, he became an economist, I think.

Seriously.

We’d love to hear about the historical names in your family.

What did they used to call your great, great, greats?

Just do tell us, 877-929-9673,

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.