Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

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2 Chapter One Names Expressing Hostility and/or Superiority Some humor scholars believe that for any joke or incident to be funny it must contain the tension that goes along with the feelings of hostility or superiority that are reflected in such humor-related terms as punch line, biting satire, sharp-tongued wit, a pointed remark, a barbed joke, to crack (or break) someone up, to knock ’em dead, and to bomb. In Night Kites, when Nicki introduces her new boyfriend, Erick Rudd, to her dad, he grins and says, “A new one, Fickle Pickle? Well, what’s your name? . . . Rudd?” Then he laughingly advises, “Don’t let her make your name Mud, Rudd” (151). In three different books (Gentlehands, Love Is a Missing Person, and Night Kites) Kerr makes jokes about the snobbishness of country clubs when she changes the name of the Hadefield Country Club to the Hate-Filled Club. In Gentlehands, she illustrates the tension that exists between ordinary townspeople and wealthy owners of seaside estates by having Buddy’s father refer to Skye Pennington, the girl he has a crush on, as Miss Gottbucks from Beaublahblah. The Penningtons live on a five-acre estate named Beauregard and Buddy observes that They always seem to have names like that, don’t they? Rich, beautiful girls are never named Elsie Pip or Mary Smith. They have these special names and they say them in their particular tones and accents, and my mother was right. I was in over my head or out of my depth, or however she put it. (1) In If I Love You, Am I Trapped Forever? the protagonist is an ordinary high school boy named Alan, who leads the attack on a new student by calling him Doomed instead of his real name, Duncan. But the more the girls in school get to know this intellectual boy, who is so different from typical high school jocks, the more they like him. Alan is amazed when he hears his girlfriend refer to Doomed as Duncan. He expresses surprise and she says, “Alan, you couldn’t believe I care anything about Dunc!” As Alan observes, “From Doomed to Duncan to Dunc was a long distance in a very short space of time” (135–36). In her autobiographical ME ME ME ME ME, Kerr says that the boy who inspired the character of Duncan was a Jewish refugee named Hyman Ginzburg. He got off to a bad start in Auburn, New York, because
the word hyman “was never spoken unless you were talking privately about the wedding night.” He was called “Hyman the Hopeless” or just plain “Hopeless” (14). Early in Little Little, which is a story about dwarves, Kerr uses names to establish a flip tone and to reveal the attitudes of the residents of the Twin Oaks Orphan’s Home where Sidney Applebaum, a dwarf with a humpback, grows up. He lives in Miss Lake’s—commonly called Mistake’s— cottage. Other residents include legless Wheels Potter, who gets around on a custom-made skateboard; Bighead Langhorn, who has a short, skinny body but a head the size of an enormous pumpkin; Cloud, a onearmed albino with a “massive head of curly white hair”; and Pill Suchanek, whose mother took a drug during her pregnancy that left Pill with flippers for arms. The teacher is named Robert but the kids call him Robot because “his only facial expression was a smile, his only mood cheerful” (18–19). Miss Lake disapproves of this kind of dark humor and implores the boys not to call Albert Cloud because “His name is Albert Werman.” Cloud insists that he likes the name because before he came to Twin Oaks he was “Albert Worm, or just plain Wormy” (63). What Miss Lake does not understand is that the boys have grabbed “naming rights” for themselves so as to take away the pain that might come from outsiders calling them names. In keeping with their attitude, they refer to “regular” people as Sara Lee, an acronym for Similar And Regular And Like Everyone Else. Names Based on Wordplay Names for Fun 3 The above examples are “softened” by wordplay, which some humor scholars say is in itself a kind of hostility because the creators are showing that they are superior to the language because they can do things with sounds that other people have not thought of. Others say the pleasure or amusement, at least for the reader or listener—if not for the creator—comes simply from the surprise, as with the biggest midyear social event in Him She Loves? It is the Dead of Winter Dance and even though people are to come dressed as someone dead, the music will be “Live from Ironing Bored” (84). Kerr loves using repetition and alliteration in creating such names as Little Little, Belle La Belle, Carolyn Cardmaker, Dirtie Dotti, Buddy
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Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

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