What's Your Name?

Do I Stand a Chance With You?

Department of Nomenclature

Why does my social circle not include more interesting names? My friends have names like Jon Swan, Tom Rankin, Cathy Schine, Jill Jakes. My friends don't have hyphens, like Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman, or J. Kenji Lopez-Alt (accent ague over the o), author of The Wok, Recipes and Techniques. Or Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee election commission. Or Kidiocus King-Carroll, "a food enthusiast, scholar of the Black Midwest, and an incoming assistant professor of Africana Studies at [get ready for it] California State University-Channel Islands." By "get ready for it," I mean there had to be another hyphen coming.

            We live in an age of hyphenation. Lee You-mi, an actor in Squid Games, and Dr. Patrick Shoon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, derive from cultures in which apostrophes may be a matter of course, but how about Layla Khoury-Hanold, a Food Network contributor, or Naslat Hasrat-Nazimi, a journalist covering Afghanistan for a German broadcasting service, or Karen Good-Marable, or Davey-Jay Rijke, Jay-Dylnn Wiet, J. J. Arcega-Whiteside? The poet Natalie Scenters-Zapico?

            Or the illustrator Harriet Lee-Merrion, who illustrates a point:

            Presumably, Harriet Lee-Merrion could have chosen Harriet Merrion-Lee. She chose well. Harriet Merrion-Lee is catchy, but in a tried-and-true way: Higgledy-piggledy-pop. Harriet Lee-Merrion is rhythmic but tighter, harder to scan. Like Green Bay linebacker JaQuavian Jy'Quest "Quay" Walker. Who, you may have noticed,  doesn't have a hyphen. What he has may be even better:

            He has an apostrophe.

            Like K'Lavon Chaisson, or De'Anthony Melton, or Ty'son Williams, or Myha'ha Herrold, or Gaetani di Laurenzana deli'Aquila d'Aragona Lovatelle (Ivana Trump's second of three Italian love interests after her divorce from Fuckface), or the attorney (for the family of two young Black girls waved off by a Sesame Place character) B'Ivory Lamarr.

            B'Ivory! Do you pronounce that apostrophe, slip in a little hiccup maybe between the B and the Ivory, or is it more like (but surely not exactly like) Bivory?

            None of my friends have apostrophes, either.

            I'll tell you a great-sounding name: Dirk Roofthooft, the actor who plays "the dead brother-in-law" in the Belgian series Clain. Note how the oof plays off against the irk. In the Irish version of that series, the same character is played by Claes Bang.

            What if a Roofthooft married a Bang, and became quite naturally a Roofthooft-Bang? (Surely not the other way round -- it almost goes without saying that if bang comes first, anything subsequent -- even Roofthoot -- is anti-climactic.) I say, “What if?” By that I mean, of course, “Why not?”

            In Flemish, let it be said, Roofthooft may be no more remarkable than Einstein or Jonson or Woowoo (which can be a vodka-based mixed drink, a put-down of far-out mystical thinking, or a cranberry intimate wipe). People generally, I have found, find nothing very remarkable about their own names. Even, I dare say, if their name is Karen Jenkins-Johnson, a "flagship gallerist" moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles (so cool, to yoke two boring names together), or John Berggruen, a gallerist still in San Francisco, who like Orthros, the two-headed dog of Greek mythology, goes grr in two different directions.

Department of Cross-Pollination:

            The October-November issue of Garden and Gun is out, with my column on compost. Look for it. Next issue, my column considers the differences (one crucial one) between me and Megan Thee Stallion. Obviously, one difference is that her middle name is Thee and my middle initial is A (for Alton). But that is not the crucial difference, from my point of view.

Department of Vaguely Relevant Limerick:

Says Aaron Hamilton-Burr,

For whom history's sort of a blur,

            "Is there some kind of show?

            Because people go,

'Shoot yourself much?' I'm like, 'Errr....'"