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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in naming

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Canaan Dog - Native Breed.org

“Hi: you're Caleb, right?”

I'm bartending Sunday brunch. I've never met the guy who has just sat down at my bar before, but he's the friend of a friend, and I know of him.

He gives me the generous smile of the beautiful. Hey, I get it; it's nice to be recognized. Nor am I immune: I, too, feel the gravitational pull of that attraction.

We banter a little. He's pretty full of himself, but I find myself liking him anyway. Ah, the privilege of beauty.

“Fine old Hebrew name, Caleb,” I say.

He favors me with another radiant smile. “It means 'faithful and true,'” he informs me solemnly.

Hm. Well, that may be so, but only in a derived sense: the kind of euphemistic meaning that you find in books of baby names, maybe.

I don't tell him that I know more about his name than he apparently does. I don't tell him that I speak Hebrew. (Hey, it's a fine old pagan language, with its own words for “standing stone” and “stone circle”; old enough that a name that has since become a term of abuse, originally bore a more favorable sense.) I don't tell him that his name actually means “dog.”

Sometimes the greater wisdom lies in not telling.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 The Double-Edged Sword of Eastern Philosophy – Tao Practiced

 

Well, it doesn't get much more pagan than that.

A friend was holding a Naming ceremony for her newborn son. With the community gathered around, the presiding priest, a longtime family friend, blessed the child and lifted him in the air three times. Each time, we called out the child's name. This was the first time that he was named in public.

Having received a public identity, the child then got his first taste of beer.

Here's how they did it. The child's mother held him. The priest turned, and held the coven sword back over the crook of his elbow. He trickled a little stream of beer down the blade of the sword so that a few drops dripped into the child's mouth.

Then we all cheered and applauded. Welcome to the community, kid.

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I never had a son or a daughter; gay men of my generation mostly didn't. (Talk about a failure of imagination.) But if I had, I have a pretty good idea what I would have wanted to name them, assuming it had been up to me to do so.

What do you want from a good name? Well, you want 1) something unique, but not weird enough to encourage teasing. You want 2) something with some history, some myth, to it: an old name in modern form. And you want 3) something that gives the kid a context, a sense of the culture that he or she is born into.

So, unsurprisingly, I would have wanted to give them names from the old dialect spoken by the Hwicce, the original Tribe of Witches. (Ah, the down-side of having a linguist parent.) This would have been by way of saying to them: Your life is your own, to do with as you wish, but you have a culture that's yours by right of inheritance, and always will be, whatever you may or may not choose to do with it.

 

Frytha. My daughter I would have wanted to name Frytha ("soft" -th, as in “breathe”): “peace.” Unlike speakers of modern English, who make do (or, just as often, don't make do) with only one kind of peace, the ancestors had different names for different kinds of peace; frith (“hard” -th, as in “breath”), the base-word from which the name derives, means “peace within a given community.”

Girls were still named Frith in East Anglia well into the early “20th” century. Frytha is a variant used—perhaps created—by one of my favorite (and formative) writers, novelist Rosemary Sutcliff; it's the name given to the bow-maid viewpoint character of her 1956 teen novel The Shield Ring. It's not a form that would have made sense to the Anglian-speaking ancestors, for whom -a was a masculine ending, but that's surely acceptable. As Mordechai Kaplan says, the ancestors get a vote, but not a veto.

So, welcome Frytha.

 

Siffrith. My son, I would name for a hero: a dragon-slaying hero, in fact.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
A Dog Named Yahweh

Back in the 80s, a friend was thinking about getting a new dog. She planned to name him Yahweh.

People, of course, name their pets for gods all the time. (Whether or not this is a good idea lies outside the parameters of this post.) Still, naming your dog Yahweh seems a little...well, let me at least say that I wouldn't do it. Do you really want to use someone that you love to even a score?

For this was the Reagan Era, and the Age of the Culture Wars. The danger of a full-blown theocracy in the US seemed like a very real possibility at the time. (The Kreesh-chun Reich certainly seemed to think so.) So you did what you could to strike a blow—even a symbolic one—against the theocrats and their triumphalist ways.

One can, of course, readily appreciate the idea's humorous potential.

"Yahweh bit me!"

“Bad Yahweh! Bad boy!”

“Yahweh really stinks; I'm afraid he needs another bath.”

“Oh no, Yahweh peed on the carpet again.”

Still, when it comes to Yahwehs, one has to admit that one—even one that only exists in people's heads—is bad enough.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    I think of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, with the shopping mall zombies, the zombie Hare Krishna and the zombie nun among them. Satir
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I remember the 80's too well. Ronald Reagan Antichrist, Nancy Reagan the Scarlet Woman, Milton Freedman the False Prophet. I had
Why the Term 'Wiccaning' Doesn't Work, and What to Replace It With

I always cringe when I hear the term “wiccaning.”

Moral of the story: Let the borrower beware.

...
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Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    Wiccaning makes me think of weaving a wicker basket. Naming sounds right.

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
How Not to Rename a Lake

“Then turn right when you get to....”

The clerk pauses in her direction-giving. A year ago, she would have said “...when you get to Lake Calhoun.” But last summer the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) decided to change the official name of Minneapolis' largest lake back to its original name.

“...Bde Maka Ska,” I say. She nods, gratefully, and continues with her directions.

Really, you can't blame her not being able to remember the “new” name. She doesn't speak Dakota. Most people don't.

I applaud the DNR's decision to shed the imposed triumphalist name, and to call the Lake formerly known as Calhoun what those who originally dwelt on its shores called it.

But I think that they've gone about it wrong.

It's a little much to expect most English speakers to wrap their tongues around a word that begins with bd-. (When's the last time that you used the word bdellium in a sentence?) To most non-Dakota speakers, Bde Maká Ska reads as gibberish: hard to pronounce, hard to remember.

So they end up calling the lake “Calhoun” anyway, which rather defeats the purpose of the change.

Here's what I think that the DNR should have done. The Dakota-speakers who lived on the southern shores of the lake named it Bde Maká Ska, “White Earth Lake,” for the deposits of white clay found on its banks.

White Earth Lake”: that's the new/old name that the DNR should have chosen.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Greetings fellow Twin Citizen, and thanks: blessed are they that do their research. Luck to the work of language preservation: the
  • Mary Lanham
    Mary Lanham says #
    Fellow Twin Cities pagan here! My initial reaction to the name change was also that the English translation would have been more e
A Few Friendly Tips on Choosing a Coven Name

Take your time. In the initial exhilaration of coming together, it's altogether tempting to want to name your new coven right away.

My recommendation is, don't. This is really far too important a decision to rush into.

Names are Wyrd-ful things. A coven name is aspirational, yes: but though it shapes what the coven will eventually become, it also needs to reflect what the coven already is. And sometimes that can take a while to "firm up."

So go slowly, and hold out for quality.

Avoid the humorous. Really, will the joke still seem funny 25 years down the road, after the ten thousandth repetition?

Probably not.

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