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There’s this thing I can’t let go of. It’s this comparison of me to this girl I’ll never be. The IT Girl that everyone wants to be friends with, the one who isn’t invisible.

Every morning I put on my Arizona jeans and know they aren’t the True Religions she would wear. And every time I curl my eyelashes I wonder what’s the point as they’re scrawny and clumpy when I coat them with Extralash Maybelline and know hers would be longer, lusher much prettier coated in beautiful, shiny mascara by Mac. And the worst part? Every time I get a crush on a guy, usually an IT Guy, I know she would know the perfect thing to say because Mr. IT would not only see her, unlike myself, but she’d know how to speak his language. The language if IT.

It’s like I have this curse on me that makes me invisible and I’ve been spending all of high school trying to find a cure. No matter what I’ve done in the nearly four years I’ve gone to Blossom Hill High School my IT factor never changes, my invisibility factor remains the only steady, constant in my life. You might want to know why I want IT so bad. Why can’t I just be happy without IT and hang out with my brigade of friends who are equally invisible. There’s two reasons really. The first, besides the fact that I don’t really fit in with them either as they are all in band and I’m not, is because everyone, even the invisible want to feel special in some way. And the second is because I love, or I should say used to love, a challenge. But the real, deep down reason? I decided when I was a Freshman that I didn’t want to sit home, all alone on Senior Prom Night. If that ever happened I’d be invisible for a lifetime.

Two weeks before Senior Prom I gave IT up. When I knew no one would ever ask me. That was the day I went to Aunty Anne’s House of Beauty and asked her to cut my hair in this super-super, short cut and everything changed.

Afterward, when the floor was covered in huge mounds of wiry, auburn fluff, Aunty Anne said, “Abagail, your eyes, they’re, they’re beautiful.” She smiled just like me, the kind of smile like looks like a “v” with kind of crooked teeth we have down low and hide pretty well because only our top ones show.

All I thought about at the time was how much I hated the name Abagail but not as much as Abby, which is what everybody called me and I just knew that the she-I-wanted-to-be would have some way-more exotic name like Cassandra or Veronica and then my Aunt said it again.

“Your eyes are beautiful.” With tears in her own.

I hugged her and thanked her even though I pulled my hoodie up over my head first chance I got when I was out of her sight, waving from her shop window, on my walk home. I ducked my head down. But as I walked through town it was like a hurricane blew around the corner of Garfield and Lincoln, my hoodie flew off and what was left of my hair couldn’t flop in the breeze and I stood face-to-face with Troy Randall. An IT boy. THE IT boy. And his eyes went wide with what I thought was horror at the sight of my hair but when the whirlwind stopped he said, “Abby?”

I just nodded and words wouldn’t leave my lips. IT happened. It finally happened. An IT guy, THE IT guy I had a crush on ever since we worked side-by-side in the middle school kitchen in seventh grade in our cooking class baking pretzels together and I over salted every one, saw me, the invisible one. Troy even made my name sound good. I froze. He’d just left Froman’s Drug Store and I

I've posted before that I think names are fun to think about.
Sometimes names have interesting meanings.

So, I am reading A Whole Nother Story (very funny, by the way).
Names are a big part of this story. If you read the book, you'll see what I mean.

This book inspired me to have a little fun with names today.
Can you tell what all these names have in common?

Megan Trump
Bella Ursa Tate
Lilly Olive Long
Quinn Thompson
Opal Marie Good
Beth Fran Ford
Ben Brett Quigley
Owen Johnson
Isaac Caleb Umpire

Check out the pictures below to see the answers.





(their initials all say/ mean something :)
You can click on a picture to see it larger.
Do YOUR initials say something?
Do some artwork with your name!

I woke up when Cassie woke up this morning but it wasn't my turn to get out of bed. So I closed my eyes and started thinking about names. I have a lot of things that need names right now. So those of you that are good at naming things, please leave me lots of suggestions in the comments. :)  Thanks.

1. My new netbook needs a name. I've never named my computers before but I want to start. The netbook is blue and is my after hours and traveling buddy. He likes steak and potatoes and chocolate. He's very impulsive and never stops to read directions before he puts something together.

2. My new laptop (won't be here until next week) needs a name too. It's an apple green workhorse that will be my main computer for everything. She's a dedicated over-achiever always willing to work late for no extra pay. She's a bit on the shy side and goes barefoot all the time.

3. I was even thinking about giving my office a name. I guess now that I'm spending more time in here (6 hours a day so far) I think we ought to move to a first name basis. It's got a cozy, garden cottage sort of feel to it and I smile every time I walk in there.

4. Plant Kid's story needs a name. I'm not stopping the work on Flyboy but Plant Kid is there, tugging at the edge of my mind and the hardest thing for me to tell him is that I have no title for him. I can't start a book without a title. No, really I can't. It's a story about a kid who doesn't have much of a family so he makes his own. Oh, and it's about plants. And about how some things you want to fix can't ever be fixed and sometimes that's a good thing.

5. This blog needs a name. No, I'm not leaving Livejournal but I want to buy a domain name, set up a shell of a website, and then put the blog front and center. From there I can add things that will build around the focus of this blog which will still be about me but hopefully more bits about inspiration, persistence, and motivation for writers.

The floor is open. ;)

Megan Branch, Intern

Operas are always full of intrigue, suspense, drama, romance—and characters with really great names like Figaro, Egisto, and Gorislava. In Who Married Figaro? A Book of Opera Characters, Joyce Bourne, co-author of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, has written over 2,500 entries about the people behind all of those funny-sounding names. Yesterday, we posted a quiz about some of opera’s figures. The answers are below. How did you do?

1. Concepción,from Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole, would invite her lovers over while Torquemada was out of the house and suggest that “they hide in large clocks and when he finds them she passes them off as customers.”

2. Erda, featured in the Wagner operas Das Rheingold and Siegfried, was the mother of three Norns and nine Valkyries. “She rises from the earth only when she sees impending disaster.”

3. The Golden Cockerel from Rimsky-Korsakov’s play of the same name was only a fair-weather friend of the Tsar: the Cockerel “later pecks him on the head and kills him.”

4. Noye, from Noye’s Fludde, was the father of Sem, Ham, and Jaffett. Noye was told by God to “build an ark in which all his family and animals ride out the storm.” Noye’s Fludde also incorporates hymns sung by the audience.

5. Prunier “reads Magda’s hand and tells her that she may, like the swallow (la rondine) find a bright future, but there is also tragedy in store. Prunier is secretly in love with Magda’s maid Lisette.

6. Sportin’ Life sold dope to Bess “and, under its influence, she leaves for New York while Porgy is being questioned by the police.”

7. Tito Vespasiano,from La Clemenza di Tito, was “anxious that his people see him not as a dictator but as a clement ruler.”

8. Zoroastro “resolves the complications of the relationships between Orlando and his former love Angelica.”

9. Spalanzani invented the doll, Olympia, with whom Hoffmann later fell in love.

10. Nick Shadow from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress took Tom Rakewell away from his fiancé, Anne, and led him “to a life of debauchery. When all Tom’s money is gone, they play cards” for Tom’s soul. Tom wins and “in anger Shadow condemns him to a life of insanity.”

Megan Branch, Intern

Operas are always full of intrigue, suspense, drama, romance—and characters with really great names like Figaro, Egisto, and Gorislava. In Who Married Figaro? A Book of Opera Characters, Joyce Bourne, co-author of the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, has written over 2,500 entries about the people behind all of those funny-sounding names. Here’s a quiz about some of opera’s  figures. Go ahead and see if you can get all the answers right in the comments. Be sure to check back tomorrow for the answers.

1. The clockmaker’s wife hid her many lovers inside of clocks to conceal them from her husband, Torquemada.

2. This earth goddess, mother of twelve, only leaves the earth to deal with disaster.

3. This very special bird has the job of warning Tsar Dodon of enemies.

4. The title character from the Britten opera that incorporates an audience sing-along and a well-known story from the Bible.

5. This character, from Puccini’s La Rondine, was a palm reader in love with a maid.

6. Gershwin’s seller of ‘happy-dust’ in Porgy and Bess.

7. Mozart’s Roman emperor who didn’t want to seem like a dictator.

8. The magician who helped to smooth over relationship complications in Handel’s Orlando.

9. This inventor made the mechanical doll that Hoffmann fell in love with in Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann.

10. This ‘shadowy’ character was the devil in disguise, stole a soul after a lost game of cards and his signature aria is “I burn! I freeze!”.

Have you ever known anyone with a silly name? I know several people with silly names. Here are a few. These are real names of people I know.

• Jerry Derryberry
• Justin Case ( Just in case)
• Lou Sir  (loser)
• Harry Butts
• Mr. Pehole
• Mr. Dicky
• Race Carr
• Dr. Love
• Alpha Omega
• Icie Glove
• Bunny Hop
• Kanoe Waters
• Daisy Flowers
• Chow Maine
• River Fish

Have you ever known anyone with a silly name? I know several people with silly names. Here are a few. These are real names of people I know.

• Jerry Derryberry
• Justin Case ( Just in case)
• Lou Sir  (loser)
• Harry Butts
• Mr. Pehole
• Mr. Dicky
• Race Carr
• Dr. Love
• Alpha Omega
• Icie Glove
• Bunny Hop
• Kanoe Waters
• Daisy Flowers
• Chow Maine
• River Fish

When I first signed on with agent Elana, I asked her whether my last name was going to be a problem.  I mean, let's face it, I'm not luck enough to have a short forceful name, ala John Green, or something alliterative, like Gail Giles. I've got a mess of vowels and consonants in my last name that nobody really knows how to deal with. Heck, I even have an uncle who, after a trip to Europe, announced that he was going to pronounce it different from the rest of us, having consulted with the good European people about how it should be pronounced.

But authors like Zusak, Levithan, and Pfeffer give me hope, and I'm sticking with the name I was born into.

The best way I've found to explain the pronouciation is this: It's BAY-shores, plural, like shores of the bay. I explained it that way to my future husband, when I met him at the college paper, and he teased me for months--"hey, Pam Shores-of-the-Bay!". But maybe that was just because I was so skilled with the one-pica tape and he was trying to get my attention.

So, with apologies to the Tink TInks:

They call me 'BACH-oars'
They call me 'Ba-SHORES'
They call me 'BACH-oose'
They call me 'BAY-shore'
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name

They call me 'BUH-shores'
But I'm not that
Bach-Buh-Bas
Always the same
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name

No, I'm not talking about the Destiny's Child song of that title (which I love, love, love, btw). I'm talking my actual personal name. More specifically, the pronunciation of my actual personal name. I don't think my name is that confusing to pronounce, but I've had some wacky attempts over the years. (Most often, it's people trying to pronounce Tera as Teera. Seriously?)

Well, that's all about to change!

Because Oh. My. Gods. was featured in School Library Journal's Curriculum Connections newsletter (twice!) I was invited to call in to the teachingbooks.net Author Name Pronunciation Guide. If you visit that page, you can scroll down to my name (past amazing authors like Sherman Alexie, Melissa Marr, John Green and Neil Gaiman) and click to hear an audio recording of yours truly in which I not only pronounce my full name, but also share a funny story about it. (Or, if you're too lazy to scroll all that way, you can click directly to my page.)

What about you? Have you ever heard your name butchered? Do you have any clever ways for telling people how to pronounce your name? (I might say, "It's Tera, like Sarah with a T.") Or how about a funny story to share about your name? Dish, people. Dish.

Hugs,
TLC

OH. MY. GODS. (available now!)
GODDESS BOOT CAMP (coming June 2009)
teralynnchilds.com

By Anatoly Liberman

The Internet and language change. The question I received can be summarized in two points. 1) Will texting and the now prevalent habit of abbreviating whole phrases (the most-often cited example is LOL “laugh out loud”) affect language development in a serious way? 2) Will the unprecedented exposure to multiple dialects and cultures that the Internet provides result in some sort of universal language? Linguistic futurology is a thankless enterprise, but my inclination is to answer no to both questions. Every message is functional. Texting, like slang and all kinds of jargon, knows its place and will hardly escape from its cell-phone cage. Some abbreviations may become words, and a statement like she lol’ed when I asked her whether she would go out with me is not unimaginable. Countless acronyms like Texaco, BS, UNO, and snafu clutter our speech; if necessary, English will survive a few more. It is the collapse of reading habits and the general degradation of culture that threaten to reduce our vocabulary to lol’able basics. As to the second part of the question, I would like to point out that the Internet is only one component of globalization. It ignores borders, but new Compuranto, destined to replace our native languages, is not yet in the offing.

Disappearing words. The question runs as follows: “For years I’ve wondered if spell-check is responsible for the disappearance of the word pled (as in he pled guilty vs. the current he pleaded guilty) and similar words that were in common usage until about twenty or so years ago. Other words that seem to have disappeared are knelt, sunk, etc.” I wonder what our readers will say. As far as I can judge, all those words are still around. In student newspapers, which reflect the poorly edited and unbuttoned-up usage of the young, I see almost only pled guilty. If anything, it is pleaded that gave way to pled in the legal phrase, probably under the influence of bled and fled. (I am not sure how many people have gone over to we pled with her but in vain). In American English, sunk seems to be the most common past tense of sink, and once, when I used sank in this blog, I was taken to task and then forgiven, when it turned out that the OED “allows” the principal parts sink—sank—sunk, like shrink—shrank—shrunk. Knelt seems to be the preferred form in British English. In any case, it is felt to be more elevated, though the OED gives both forms (knelt and kneeled) without comment. In a few other cases, American English has also chosen regular weak preterits: thus, burned, learned, spelled rather than burnt, learnt, spelt. Whatever the cause of the variation, it is clearly not the spell-check.

A family name. What is the origin of the family name Witthaus? Both witt- and haus are common elements of German family names. Strangely, Witthaus did not turn up in the most detailed dictionaries of German family names or of American last names of German descent. However, I will venture an etymology. Haus is clear (”house”). Witt- can have several sources, but, most likely, in this name it means “white” (if so, the form is northern German, Dutch, or Frisian). The European ancestors of the Witthaus family must have lived in or near a house painted white.

The origin of separate words. Handicapped. I am copying the information from The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, which offers a curtailed version of what can be found in the OED. The word appeared in English texts in the middle of the 17th century and meant a lottery in which one person challenged an article belonging to another, for which he offered something in exchange, an umpire being chosen to decree the respective values. In the 18th century, the phrases handicap match and handicap race surfaced. They designated a match between two horses, in which the umpire decided the extra weight to be carried by the superior horse. Hence applied to the extra weight itself, and so to any disability in a contest. Presumably, from the phrase hand i’ (in) cap, the two parties and the umpire in the original game all depositing forfeit money in a cap or hat. Shampoo. From a Hindi verb meaning “press!” (The original reference was to massage). Meltdown. Amusingly, the earliest recorded form in the OED refers to ice-cream (1937). The word acquired its ominous meaning in connection with accidents in nuclear reactors and spread to other areas; hence the meltdown of the stock market. As our correspondent notes, it has become a buzzword (and therefore should be avoided, except when reactors are meant). Hoi polloi. From Greek. It means “all people, masses.” Sun dog. Judging by the earliest citations in the OED, in the thirties of the 17th century the word was already widely known. However, its origin is said to be “obscure.” I can offer a mildly intelligent guess. Considering the superstitions attending celestial phenomena, two false suns sometimes visible on both sides of the real one could have been thought of as dogs pursuing it. The idea of two wolves following the sun and the moon, both of which try to escape their enemies and constantly move on, occurred to the medieval Scandinavians. Even the names of the wolves, Skoll (Anglicized spelling) and Hati, have come down to us. When the world comes to an end (a situation described in great detail in Scandinavian myths), the wolves catch up with and swallow their prey. As regards sundog, the missing link would be a theological or astronomical treatise that introduced and justified the use of the word. In their absence all guesses are hot air. If it is any consolation, I can say that the origin of dog days and hot dog is not obscure. The etymology of hot dog required years of painstaking research.

A few Americanisms. Conniption. Everybody seems to be in agreement that it is a “fanciful formation.” However, this phrase simply means “an individual coinage.” The question is who coined conniption and under what circumstances. I wonder whether a search for some short-lived popular song or cartoon will yield any results. Such words often come from popular culture. At the moment, we can only say that despite its classical look, conniption, which does not trace to Latin or any Romance language, must have been modeled on such nouns as conscription, constriction, conviction, and so forth. Whether a conniption fit, that is, a fit of rage or hysteria, is “related” to nip is anybody’s guess. Jaywalk. This is an equally opaque word. The verb jaywalk is a back formation on the noun jaywalker, because no other model of derivation produces English compounds made up of a noun followed by a verb. In similar fashion, kidnap is not a sum of kid and nap, but a back formation on kidnapper, another Americanism (from kid and napper “thief”), a cant word, stressed originally, like the verb, on the second element; the reference is to the people, not necessarily children, decoyed and snatched from their homes to work as servants or slaves in the colonies; such servants were often called kids: compare boy in colonial English, busboy, and cowboy, as well as the title of Robert L. Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped). It is also clear that the reference in jaywalker cannot be to the bird. Crows do not fly in a straight line, “kiddies” do not cut corners (kiddy-corner ~ cater-corner), and jays do not walk. Jay is one of the many words for a country bumpkin, along with hick, hillbilly, hayseed, redneck, and others. It has been suggested that people from rural areas (jays) came to town and, ignorant of street lights, crossed busy streets in an erratic way. Those were allegedly jaywalkers. The foundation of this etymology is shaky, since jay has never been a widespread word for a rustic. Other suggestions are even worse, and the literature on the word is all but nonexistent. Jukebox. Also a crux. Several meanings of juke have been attested, one of them being “roadside inn; brothel,” allegedly an Afro-Caribbean word. Juke refers to things disorderly and noisy, and jukeboxes were installed in saloons and other cheap places. Since jukebox originated in Black English, its African etymology is not improbable. But I would like to point out that the sound j often has an expressive function in English, whether it occurs word finally (budge, fudge, grudge, nudge) or word initially (job, jog, jig, jazz). It is perhaps a coincidence, but note that both jaywalker and juke begin with this sound. Haywire. From the use of hay-baling wire in makeshift repairs; hence “erratic, out of control.”

Hunyak. A derogatory term for a person of non-western, usually central or eastern, European background; a recent immigrant, especially an unskilled or uneducated laborer with such a background. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), which has citations for these words going back to 1911, makes a plausible suggestion that hunyak (sometimes capitalized and alternating with honijoker, honyak, etc.) is perhaps a blend of Hun or Hunk “Hungarian” and Polack. There may be no need to posit a blend, for -ack is a common suffix in Slavic; it could have been added to hun-. DARE gives multiple citations of Hunk ~ hunk ~ hunks (with reinforcing -s) ~ Hungy, and so forth. Stupnagel. “Moron.” I risked a conjecture that proved to be correct. First, I rejected any connection with Hitler’s general Fr. von Stupnagel, who was not a fool (the opposite is true) and not a familiar figure in the United States. As with conniption, I suggested that the word had emerged in popular culture (a sketch, a show, or a series of cartoons) and reconstructed a character whose name was made up of stup- (from stupid) and -nagle, from finagle. Mr. Nathan E. J. Carlson, an assistant at DARE, has kindly sent me the information provided by Dr. Leonard Zwilling, that in 1931 a radio program in Buffalo, NY featured two idiots: Stoopnagle (so spelled) and Buddy. In 1933 a film was released with those characters, the first of them becoming Colonel Lemuel Q. Stoopnagle. There must have been a good reason for the change, because Lemuel is the first name of Swift’s Gulliver. I do not know what made the author introduce Stoopnagle, but my etymology (a blend of stupid and finagle) looks good. The author could also have been inspired by the German word Nagel “nail” (compare stud “nail,” with its obscene meaning, and the hero of Farrell’s novel Studs Lonigan) or perhaps wanted one of the characters to be a German, to invite a few cheap laughs. But the word stupnagle almost certainly goes back to that radio program. Judging by what one finds in the Internet, the word, but not its origin, is well-known.

A few comments on comments. Buzzwords. A fellow professor agrees with my negative attitude toward academic clichés like cutting edge and interdisciplinary, for which I am grateful. Those words shape our thought and pretend to disguise our shallowness. No grant can be received without brandishing a cutting edge, as though it were a bare bodkin, and proving one’s interdisciplinary ability to sit between two stools. Every elected official is “proud and humbled,” administrators (a vociferous chorus) rail against “an overblown sense of entitlement” by constantly promoting it, eagle-eyed journalists see the simplest things only through a “lens,” and no ad in the sphere of education will dare avoid the adjective diverse. What a dull new world! When asked about verbs like to Blagojevich, I said that verbs derived from last names seem to be rare. Several correspondents sent me what they believed to be such verbs; however, with one exception, they remembered words having suffixes (like macadamize). The exception is to Bork. Bork, a monosyllable, lends itself naturally to becoming a verb. I was glad to read that my post on Swedish kul, published in the middle of an inclement winter, warmed the cockles of a Swedish teacher’s heart (I pointed out that kul is not a borrowing of English cool), and it was interesting to read another late 19th century example of the superlative degree coolest (cool “impudent”). The correspondent who thinks that the phrase that’s all she wrote has nothing to do with Hazlitt’s time (because the contexts are different) may be right, but the old citation shows that the model for such phrases existed long before World War II.

Note. I received a question about the origin of akimbo. This word needs more than a few lines of discussion. See my post on it next Wednesday.

Fuse #8 linked to these lists of the Hottest Baby Names of 2008, per Parents.com. (And while you're there, check out the whiteness of all those babies pictured! Not an Aaliyah among them, I bet.)

One thing that struck me, perusing the Top 50 lists, is how many names appeared on both lists. Eight of fifty are, based on popularity, gender-neutral. And I'm guessing that if you looked at the Top 100, you'd find a bunch more. Here are the eight:

• Avery (#15 girls/#13 boys)
• Riley (#16/#15)
• Dylan (#26/#23)
• Logan (#27/#24)
• Hayden (#35/#29)
• Bailey (#40/#31)
• Brooklyn (#41/#33)
• Taylor (#46/#35)

I have to admit, I'm a fan of gender-neutral names. I can't fully articulate why. My reasons range from thinking, "What if someday I have a child with ambiguous genitalia?" (yes, I really do ask myself these questions) to remembering how much I despised my own name when I was a kid (sorry, Mom). I never felt like a "Lisa," which struck me as a very delicate, feminine name. I wasn't pretty; I didn't want a pretty name.

I remember being thrilled in fourth grade when, in a musical, I got to choose a name for my character. I chose "Leslie"—which has lost popularity as a boys' name in the past couple decades but historically is gender-neutral. At one Scout camp I worked at, I went by "Wishbone." At another, "Pete." Sometimes I still forget, when people say "Lisa," they're talking about me.

In one of my novel manuscripts, the main character has a gender-neutral name. The few people who read the first draft came back to me and said, "Hey, I didn't know until page eight that Colby was a girl. Was that intentional?" Actually, Holly Black, who critiqued my first ten pages at the Wisconsin SCBWI conference, said something to the effect of, "For the first eight pages, I thought Colby was a boy—and a real asshole!" I ended up revising the second paragraph to include a gender reference, clearing up the confusion and exonerating Colby of asshole-ism. The character was so clear in my mind, I never guessed people would think she was a boy. Oops.

Not that it always matters. A friend pointed me to Fish, by L. S. Matthews. The story is told in first person by a completely gender-ambiguous narrator. The narrator is referred to only as "you," "Tiger," or "the child." A very rare thing, no? I think I've seen some first-person picture books with gender-ambiguous narrators, but they're definitely in the minority, especially when illustrations come into the mix. Can you think of any?

One more thing about these "hot" baby names—the obsession with Aidan is getting on my nerves. Check out these names from the boys' list:

• Aidan (#1)
• Jayden (#2)
• Caden (#6)
• Peyton (#17)
• Hayden (#29)
• Brayden (#37)

Am I the only one who thinks this is a little silly? I mean, we're naming babies, not playing the Name Game, right? I half expected Bananafanafofaden to make the list.

from an article on nomenclature in New Scientist (via Bookforum):

"We had particular problems with fruit-fly researchers," says Sue Povey of University College London, who chaired the committee approving names for human genes from 1996 to 2007. "They were always giving their genes names like hedgehog."

a name.

Really.

I can ALMOST work without a title for the book but this no name thing for the plant kid is making me crazy. I had one name and I liked it a lot. But then I started trying to figure out how he got the name and it didn't work with the story and now I've lost my connection to that name. Then I thought I had one that would work but it still doesn't feel right.

I'm looking for a one syllable boy's name, sorta soft sounding, not hard. Not too common. (Piece of cake, right?) Anyway, if you are one of those people who excels at names, I'm taking all suggestions.

A Bonny Glen reader wrote me with a whole bunch of really good questions. Actually, I’ve had several emails come in recently with suggestions for topics or questions to answer. I’ll be tackling some of those in the days and weeks to come. But this is a lazy Saturday morning so I’m starting with the easy one.

Can I ask how you pronounce Lissa? It is like the second half of Melissa or the name Lisa?

Like the second half of Melissa. If you want the whole scoop on my name, it goes like this. Melissa Wiley is, as you know, my pen name. But the Melissa part is real. My middle name is Anne-with-an-e and that e was always very important to me as a child, so that when I first read Anne of Green Gables at age eleven, I loved her instantly and devotedly from the moment she made the big deal about having her name spelled correctly even in people’s minds.

When I got married, I kept Anne as my middle name instead of making my maiden name my new middle name as many women do. But I love my maiden name, Brannon, too.

When I was growing up, my family had two names for me. (They still do.) Well, three names if you count Melissa, which was only used when I was in trouble, usually in company with Anne. My official first name with the family has always been Missy. I am still Missy to my parents and sisters (Merry and Molly) and cousins and some of my high-school friends. And that’s fine; Missy is a comfy and friendly name, I think.

But at home, growing up, I was always Lissa too. Casually, unofficially, in a “Lissa, dinner’s ready!” kind of way. My parents would introduce me as Missy (and that’s how I signed my papers in school, and what teachers called me), but when they were just speaking offhandedly, affectionately, they usually said Lissa. So I loved that name too.

And by the end of senior year, I was tired, for a while, of being ‘little Missy.’ (I have always been the shrimpiest one in the class.) I kept meeting people with dogs named Missy. (I actually had a dog named Missy myself, when I was a baby. She was named Missy before my parents got her, and she was older than I was. They changed her name to Sissy. She was a dear little doggie.) Missy felt like a little girl’s name, and some of my drama club friends had picked up on Lissa from hearing my parents say it, so when I went to college I just introduced myself as Lissa, not Missy. And it stuck. I met Scott in college, so that’s the name he’s always known me by.

But actually he almost never calls me Lissa. He calls me L, and so do his brothers. If you’ve known me online long enough to remember my old “[email protected]” address, you might know that “tisell” meant ’tis L.

One thing about “Lissa” is that lots of people mis-hear it as “Lisa,” so in recent years I have introduced myself more and more as just Melissa. But it really throws me when people call me that in person. I jump, because that’s still the “teacher is mad at me” name.

Another high-school friend nicknamed me “Misery” as a joke because I don’t tend to be a miserable sort of person. And it became the stuff of high-school legend one day when that friend offered me a ride home from school, and I was walking with another friend who was kind of an endearingly arrogant guy, and he assumed the invitation extended to him, and the car-driving friend informed him curtly that no it did not. And he said, “Aw, come on, you know Misery loves company!”

She gave him a ride.

It’s true, too; I do love company.

I get a lot of letters addressed to Mrs. Wiley. Once, at a conference where I was a speaker, the organizers gave Scott a nametag too: “Scott Wiley.” That made us laugh and laugh. Sometimes if he forgets to do something and I ask him about it, he says, “Go ask Mr. Wiley.”

Most of my friends’ children call me Mrs. Peterson. I am still young enough, at age 39 and coming up on 14 years of marriage, that it feels funny to be called that. In Virginia most kids called me “Miss Lissa,” and Scott was “Mister Scott,” which cracked me up and generated a lot of Star Trek jokes on my part. Alice’s kids call me Lissa and mine call her Alice.

Here in San Diego, people startle when they hear that my husband’s name is Scott Peterson. That name will forever be linked to the wife-and-baby murderer, here and in lots of other places. But my Scott Peterson’s name was in print long before that guy started making headlines. There’s a Scott Peterson who writes books about Rwanda, too, and one who works in film production at Warner Brothers. If you see his name in movie credits, that’s not my guy. (Although his name does come up on a computer screen in the Batcave in the first Batman animated movie, and that’s a reference to my Scott.) If it’s in a comic book, that’s my beloved Mr. Wiley.

Wiley was the first name of my great-great-great-great- I-can’t-remember-if-it’s-four-or-five-greats-grandfather, Wiley Tyler, who died in a Confederate prison camp. He was an Alabaman himself, and there’s a big story there, but I’m saving it for a novel. When HarperCollins asked me to choose a pen name beginning with W so booksellers wouldn’t be so confused about where to shelve my Little House books (Roger MacBride’s books gave them fits—shelve them with Laura’s books because they’re sequels? or shelve them under M for MacBride?), I chose Wiley in honor of my fine old ancestor, so that my pen name would be a family name too.

Although I quite liked Alice’s suggestion at the time that I choose “Willard” as an homage to Betsy’s sweetheart, Joe Willard, from the Betsy-Tacy books.

I once published a poem (and won a literary award for it) under my maiden name, Melissa Brannon. I’ve published lots of things under my married name, Melissa Peterson. Scott and I collaborated on a beginning reader science book about ants once, and we used our middle names as a psuedonym: Anne James.

There you go, more than you ever wanted to know about my name. My names. All of ’em.

Last week, I posted about character names that, by themselves, evoke personality. And I promised I’d follow up with a post about unusual character names.

Unless you want your characters to fade into the woodwork, you don’t name them Bob and Nancy Smith. A distinctive name evokes personality, culture and heritage, parents’ personality, time period. And it has a greater chance of getting wedged in your brain.

Some of my favorite distinctive, but fairly realistic, character names: Ramona Quimby, Minerva Clark, Hugo Cabret, Clementine, Arthur Dent, Kiki Strike.

Some of my least favorite distinctive character names: Holling Hoodhood, Comfort Snowberger, Lionel Esrog. Why don’t I like them? Maybe because they’re just a bit too unfamiliar. I’ve never known a person named Comfort (besides Alex Comfort). I’ve never known a person named Hoodhood. In fact, on a Yahoo! people search, only nine Hoodhoods come up in the entire USA. Nine. (And, interestingly, they’re all from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Udall, Kansas—not Long Island, where Gary D. Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars is set!) There are even fewer Essrogs.

This is not necessarily a criticism. The names were effective; among thousands upon thousands of other character names, they stuck in my head, right? But it does beg the question, how distinctive is too distinctive? When does unusual become just plain weird?

Twenty or so years ago, many odd character names in realistic fiction were blamed on hippie parents (e.g., Bunny, Starship, and Shadbush in Betty Miles’ B, My Name Is Bunny). I’m not sure what the rationale is these days. The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney and The Spell Book of Listen Taylor both involve the supernatural, so I suppose eccentric parents are to blame for those unusual monikers. There are an awful lot of eccentric parents out there in Fiction Land.

Books that take place in another world are, of course, excused. The Jetsons aside, you just don’t expect to meet George and Judy in a wildly fantastical or futuristic setting. Creative names are expected, if not mandatory. The main danger is names that are so unusual they’re impossible to pronounce. The difficult names, I confess, were one of my major turn-offs when I attempted to read Eragon. And let’s not talk about Tolkien.

I’m still working my way through Philip Reeve’s Hungry City Chronicles. Along with writing rollicking (and bloody) yarns, Reeve is a master of character naming to rival Charles Dickens. And he’s so brazen about it. He never shies for the ridiculous; he strives for it. And, more importantly, he pulls it off.

Reeves gives his primary characters distinctive, but believable names: Tom Natsworthy, Hester Shaw. Anna Fang and Nimrod Pennyroyal raise your eyebrows, but still slip through. Then he really lets loose. Oenone Zero. Nabisco Shkin. Minty Bapsnack. I mean, Minty Bapsnack! I ask you.

And if his human characters weren’t enough, there’s dozens of ships that need names. They range from the striking but ordinary Jenny Haniver to the head-scratching 13th Floor Elevator. But just wait until you get to a battle scene with the Bad Hair Day, Visible Panty Line, or—my favorite—Damn You, Gravity!

Ultimately, though, a memorable story is far more crucial to making its home in a reader’s memory than a memorable name alone. Take Dorothy Gale, Anne Shirley, Harry Potter. The names are as ordinary as bread and butter, but we remember them as if they belonged to our dearest friends. And, because of their stories, they are.

ETA: Interestingly, Carmela Martino's second column on character names, posted today, addresses Schmidt's naming of Holling Hoodhood. As I said, I'm not criticizing the choice of name; I know a lot of people think it's great! And it didn't stop me from very much enjoying the story. But it gave me pause. And that's something you have to consider when you're naming characters: will it give your readers pause in a good way, or a bad way? Like everything else in your book, there may be no way of knowing.

If you’ve read my blog before, you know I’m a big fan of the work of economist-turned-poet J. Patrick Lewis. I featured his poem “First Men On The Moon” in July 06, and “Necessary Gardens” in honor of Library Week in 07, and “Chocolate-Covered Ants” last Halloween. The man has a gift for the quick quip as well as the thoughtful phrase. He experiments widely with poetic form and is prolific in authoring incredibly varied poetry collections. Here’s a brief excerpt about him from my recent book, Poetry People:

J. Patrick Lewis and his twin brother were born on May 5, 1942 in Gary, Indiana. Lewis earned his bachelor’s degree at St. Joseph's College in Indiana, his master’s degree from Indiana University, and his Ph.D. in economics from The Ohio State University. While working on his doctorate, he became an International Research and Exchanges Fellow, and he and his family spent a year in the former USSR. Later, he and his family participated in cultural exchanges, and they returned to Moscow and St. Petersburg for ten shorter visits. For over twenty years, Lewis taught Economics at Otterbein College in Westerville, Ohio, retiring in 1998. While teaching, he published widely in academic journals, newspapers, and magazines on the topic of economics.

Lewis then turned to writing children’s poetry and took three years to study the craft of poetry on his own. His first book of poems for children, A Hippopotamusn’t, was published in 1990 and he has followed with nearly fifty more children’s books since then, most of which are poetry. Lewis’s poetry has been recognized by several American Library Association Notable Children’s Book citations, among other honors. Lewis is married and has five children. He is also a contributor of children's book reviews for the New York Times and a frequent speaker at schools and conferences.

I’m honored to share an original poem Pat wrote in celebration of FUN FACTS WITH NAMES DAY coming up next week on March 5. The poem will be featured in his upcoming collection, Countdown To Summer: A Poem for Every Day of the School Year (i.e., 180 poems), published by Little, Brown, 2009.

Fun Facts about Names Day March 5
“Old Names, New Names”
Used with permission

Alice Springs was once called Sturt,

Australia. New names never hurt.


Peking, China, then Beiping,

Changed one letter—now Beijing!


Paris (born Lutetia, France)

Could go back? Non, not a chance.


Delhi, India rightly claims

Half a dozen previous names.


In Turkey, Istanbul I hope’ll

Not be called Constantinople


Like before, or else become

Once again Byzantium.


Tokyo, Japan was Edo,

Which they took a vote to veto.


Used to call Regina (Sask.)

Pile o’ Bones (you had to ask?).


Names are like a brand new dress.

First you want it to impress,


When it wears out after while,

You can choose a different style.

What a fun poem to read aloud with kids-- with a map in hand, locating each place. And if you have OLD maps on hand, you may find some of these previous place names, too. Follow up with Dennis Lee’s classic poem, “A Home Like a Hiccup,” from The Ice Cream Store (HarperCollins, 1991) which begins

If I'd been born in a different place,
With a different body, a different face,
And different parents and kids to chase--
I might have a home like a hiccup:

Like Minsk! or Omsk! or Tomsk! or Bratsk!
Like Orsk or Kansk! like Kirsk or Murmansk!
Or Lutsk, Irkutsk, Yakutsk, Zadonsk,
Or even Pskov or Moskva!

Invite the children to locate the poem places on a map or mark the places that they were born or have lived. For more geography-based poems, look for Pat’s books, A World of Wonders: Geographic Travels in Verse and Rhyme (Dial Books 2002), Monumental Verses (National Geographic 2005), and Castles, Old Stone Poems (Wordsong/Boyds Mills Press 2006) co-authored with Rebecca Kai Dotlich. Then link these gems with Got Geography! selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins (Greenwillow 2006) or Diane Siebert’s Tour America : A Journey Through Poems And Art (Chronicle Books 2006). Post a world map and locate the settings for each poem. Encourage children to find or create poems for places on the map that are not yet in the books.

For more poetry, go to the Poetry Friday Round Up hosted by Kelly Fineman.

Picture credit: http://www.jpatricklewis.com/

In the most recent issue of The Prairie Wind, the Illinois SCBWI’s newsletter, Carmela Martino had an interesting article about putting thought into naming characters. What can you glean from a character based on name alone, she asks? How is a Hubert different from a Kyle?

But one thing I’d like to know that Martino didn’t address is how do names alone suggest characterization?

Is it something about the way they sound when you say them? Is a Leilani beautiful and graceful, the way the name dances from your lips? In which case, does that make a Gretchen abrasive?

Or is it because of other words the name evokes? You might expect a Kurt to be, well, curt. Or a Bruce to be bear-like, because of the word Bruin. Rose to be beautiful but hiding a few thorns.

And there’s nicknames. A boy who insists on being called James instead of Jim is reserved and particular. Every nickname for a girl named Alexandra – Alex, Lexi, Sandy, Xandra, you name it – says something different about her.

A William has hundreds of regal predecessors. An Adolf immediately calls to mind Hitler.

Certain patterns in literature, however, I can’t understand. For example, I’ve wondered why so many Percys turn out to be wankers or downright evil: Percy Weasley from Harry Potter, Peerless Percy from The Man Without a Face, Percy Wetmore from The Green Mile, and I know I’ve encountered others. Is it because “Percy” sounds like “prissy” or “persnickety”? Is it because it evokes pursing your lips when you taste something sour? In which case, why not pursing your lips for a kiss?

(With some thought I can think of some positive Percys. Percy Jackson from The Lightning Thief immediately comes to mind, of course. With a little more digging, I’ve also come up with Percy Engine – Thomas’s best friend – and Sir Percy of Scandia, a/k/a Black Knight, from Marvel comics. Maybe the tide is turning?)

More thoughts on character names – specifically, unusual ones – in literature are on the way…

I came to the conclusion a couple of weeks ago that I needed to rename all the characters in my book except for the MC. Have I managed to do that yet? No. None of them seem right. What's worse, because I need so many of them, it feels overwhelming.

 If you are one of those people who can use a generic name until the right one comes along, more power to you. I can't.

I really don't enjoy trying to come up with the right name for each character. It's downright painful sometimes, like trying on a pair of shoes in the store and you think they feel pretty good but who's to tell when you wear them to work and it's too late to send them back and suddenly you have a blister on your heel and you fold squares of toilet paper into a wedge and stuff it into the shoes so you can make in til the end of the day and then the next day the thought of even looking at those shoes makes you want to cry. (This can't just happen to me, right?)

Tonight's mission is to find one name, just one and I'll be happy. Like a name for a rough-around-the-edges adult female character who becomes a mentor of sorts to the MC. Or names for the 3 or 4 kids that are obstacles to the MC through-out the book. Or a name for the dog even. Sheesh. It shouldn't be that hard. But it is.

Flipping through the baby books isn't doing it for me this time and I don't think I even own a phonebook anymore (which is how I came up with my own name). So what do you do to find the right name for a character? And when you pick a name, does it feel instantly right or do you have to break it in, just like that pair of new shoes?
 

Are you a name-a-holic? If so, oh, the fun you will have with Nymbler! I believe I've linked here before to Laura Wattenberg's formidable blog & name-search tool, NameVoyager. Now, there's Nymbler, which can help you find a stylistic match for names of siblings, or just help you while away some time idly contemplating your taste in names. Trust me: this is fun even if you are not actively contemplating procreation.

I was playing with it last night to find some names that would go well with the names of myself, my siblings, my husband, and his siblings, and was impressed with what Nymbler gave me. I didn't love every single name, but I liked at least a few of them enough to put them in my favorites section.

For example, this set of names: Sophie, Sarah, Charlotte, Marcus, Adam, Rebecca
Yielded the following suggested names: Elsa, Elizabeth, Madeleine, Joseph, Ivan, Matthew

(All the names it suggested as companions for Nell (for boys, at least) were way, way too informal for my liking, though.)

And if you don't like what's on page one, you can request more suggested names, and more, and more, and more. Many, many minutes may be spent poring over name lists and meanings, and on subtly adjusting your six inspiration names to glean results more to your liking.

UPDATE!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!!! I'm so excited about all the submissions. As I'm about to have a baby (in like, a week) I'll not get to these until July, but please know that every name has been counted, and there WILL be a group of finalists, and a winner! Hurrah!

Okay, I've never done a contest of any kind before, but I'm stuck on something. So I'm turning to the small (but growing) number of brilliant people who read this little site for help with my next book, "Any Which Wall."

Here's the deal:

I need to NAME a dastardly fellow, a filthy scoundrel, a naughty man from the Wild Wild West, stuck in the 21st century. He's truly rotten-- cruel to animals, mean to kids, and willing to rob banks and kidnap YOU just for the fun of it. He wears a black hat and a long dark coat. He smells funny.

Can you help me???

Just enter your suggestions (as many as you want, but one per comment please, so I can keep track of how many entries I've got) in the comment field of this blog.

I'll select the best name I'm offered for use in my book (Random House, 2009), and the winner will be thanked most graciously, and also given a signed ARC of the finished book, and the chance to name ANOTHER character in the book as well (I'll select the character). But they can name this other character ANYTHING THEY WANT!

I suggest that the winner use this opportunity to honor their mother or win points with their boss (I've discovered recently that moms LOVE to appear in books). But as far as I'm concerned, anything (suitable for readers 7-11) goes!

So bring it on! Help me write a book! Name my villain!

(Disclaimer-- while at least one person WILL win, and receive the chance to name a secondary character and a signed ARC, I reserve the right to change the dastardly villain's name at a later point if I have a middle-of-the-night writing freakout or a stroke of genius. Because, after all, writers are flaky and controlling and fickle!)

And please, if you have a blog, feel free to plug/link this contest! I need all the help I can get... Read the rest of this post

Thanks to all who commented in the Lurking post.

I, of course, looked up those I could (some people didn't leave links; others had blogger accounts that were private.) And I added some links to my blogroll and bloglines. (If I missed you, either comment or email me because I did try to find you!)

As I was reading Grace Lin's website, I found this funny story about Grace was Pacy until first grade.

So, here's my true name story. Or, actually, my grandmother's (that's her photo I use as an icon.)

Nana was named and christened Bridget. She was the only daughter, so her nickname was Ciss. Actually, she was only called Ciss. When she started school, an older cousin took her to be registered. As an aside, this was because by that time, her mother was widowed, raising her own four children, two nieces, a nephew, and working full time. Can I say "busy?" And the cousin who took her to school didn't like the name Bridget; she preferred the name Beatrice. And that was the name the school wrote down. It wasn't until Nana went to get married that she learned her real name. Oh, and as an aside? The 1920 census has Nan's name as Frances.