Vanessa, Cedric, and Pamela, Author-Coined 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. And Grant, I have a little puzzle for you.

All right.

What do the following three proper names have in common? They are Vanessa, Pamela, and Cedric.

Are they recent innovations, recently invented?

Relatively so.

Are they all from authors, famous authors, coined for characters in their books and then taken by the public?

Well, so much for my puzzle.

Yes.

Okay.

Vanessa was invented by Jonathan Swift.

He invented this name for his lover, Esther Van Hummerich, who was an Irish woman of Dutch descent.

And so he took the van from Van Homrick and the Esa from her first name, Esther.

And he wrote a poem about the two of them.

And Vanessa was sort of a thinly disguised name.

Oh, that’s lovely.

Now, Cedric, that’s new.

For some reason, I thought that was like ancient Celtic or something.

Well, interesting that you say that because apparently we have Sir Walter Scott to thank for Cedric

Because in his novel, Ivanhoe, he introduced the character of Cedric the Saxon,

Which apparently was either a misunderstanding or an alteration of the much older Anglo-Saxon name,

Cerdic, C-E-R-D-I-C.

So he either got it wrong or he just tweaked it a little bit.

Yeah, so Sir Walter Scott, I mean, there was a point at which every school kid read Ivanhoe,

So it’s no wonder that name became considered absolutely ordinary.

I mean, it’s still special, but you know what I mean, like one of the many names you could choose for your children.

Yes, yes, Cedric.

The second name was Pamela, and that was invented by the 16th century poet Sir Philip Sidney for a pastoral romance,

Where he writes about two princes who disguise themselves and travel through the lovely countryside and fall in love with princesses,

One of whom was named Pamela, possibly formed from Greek for all honey, but we don’t know that.

It has a lot of intrigue, you know, and mistaken identity, and it goes on and on.

But apparently Pamela comes from that poem.

It underscores something that’s very important with names is that they’re unusual until they’re not.

They feel like Johnny-come-lately names or Susie-come-lately names until they’ve been used for centuries.

Then you’re like, well, they’ve always been here.

But it’s just not.

You know, Nevaeh, heaven backwards, is becoming regular.

It’s not unusual anymore.

Yes, that’s a really good point.

Well, gosh, so much for my puzzle.

That’s all I can say.

Martha, you and I have been at this too long.

Maybe so.

We do love to hear your challenges and your difficult questions about language and poetry.

And, of course, we love to talk about names.

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