Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

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x Introduction Leslie Dunkling, in The Guinness Book of Names, observes that adults change their names in relation to marriage or a desire to separate different parts of their lives, but other than in these situations when adults change their names they usually do it under a cloud. They want to hide from someone or something or they want to make a new start in life. In contrast, when young adults change their names it is usually done in a celebratory mood filled with optimism and anticipation. A good illustration is near the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled out to the Tuolumne and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour. I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. (98) As you read chapters 1 through 8, we think you will be surprised at the variety of books we discuss and at the multitude of purposes for which the authors have incorporated names and processes of naming. However, we should caution that in our eagerness to demonstrate the different effects that skilled authors bring about through their manipulation of names, we have made some arbitrary decisions. Rather than being comprehensive, we present a sampling in hopes of inspiring readers to make their own observations. Authors capitalize on the freedom they have in creating names because with every other part of language they are controlled by what society has already agreed upon as the meanings of chosen sounds and how they should be represented. With names, authors can use all that they know about language to create totally new sound combinations and to clip and blend old names to be spelled and used in new ways. Names are the one part of language that gives all of us the control that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty claimed for himself: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” As we’ve written this book, we have thought of six reasons that at least partly explain why young adults are especially responsive to authors who are skilled in the literary uses of names—not just personal
Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature xi names, but also place names and names for events, inventions, animals, attitudes, social developments, and imagined concepts. 1. Teenagers are more interested than are adults in manipulating and presenting names. Today’s generation of young people have grown up with computers and with instant messaging and with their own passwords and e-mail addresses. We are sometimes appalled at how much information our college students reveal about themselves in the few letters it takes to make an e-mail address. Now that we are advised to change our passwords every 180 days and to include at least eight characters, more of us are getting practice in this kind of creativity, but we had no need to create new “identifications” for ourselves until the 1970s when the shortlived fad of CB radios demanded “handles.” Some of us have taken advantage of the opportunity to create our own license plates, but as far as we know, the art of tagging, which is different from graffiti, is strictly a youth activity. According to Anne Winter, an ASU linguist who studied tagging in metropolitan Phoenix, taggers try to write their tag or nickname as often and as artistically as possible. Their motivation is simply to get up, to put one’s name in front of the public and to acquire fame “through frequency and volume.” 2 2. Today’s media makes everyone more aware of people creating their own names. When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize, newspapers wrote “Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in the steel-mill city of Lorain, Ohio.” In other news stories, we have seen comedian Whoopi Goldberg’s birth name given as Caryn Johnson, Engelbert Humperdinck’s as Arnold Dorsey, and Danny Kaye’s as David Daniel Kaminsky. The practice of adopting new and unusual names is especially common among musicians, who are some of teenagers’ most admired heroes. Virtually everyone recognizes that such names as Bo Diddley, Fats Domino, Beenie Man, Bono, Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, and Eminem are not “birth names.” Group names are even more creative, as with Guns N’ Roses and the Sex Pistols with such aggressive performer names as Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. Athletes are another group whose nicknames teenagers admire, as with football players
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Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

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