Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature - Scarecrow Press

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xii Introduction Sweetness (Walter Payton), baseball players Charlie Hustle (Pete Rose) and Slammin’ Sammy Sosa, and basketball players Magic Earvin Johnson and Sir Charles Barkley. Just as in real life where the best nicknames reflect an important aspect of personality, the most appreciated name changes in YA books are those that define the theme of the book, as do the titles of Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy, Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac McGee, and Joan Bauer’s Hope Was Here. 3. Teenagers are closer to the name games they played as children. Linguists tell us that young brains are better equipped than adult brains to learn language, which is one of the reasons that sevenand eight-year-olds love riddles and knock-knock jokes. It is also one of the reasons they create nicknames for their classmates and give derogatory names to their teachers. When folklore collector Alvin Schwartz spoke at a humor conference on our campus, he made the point that children are basically powerless in their relationships with adults and so they seek emotional relief through name play. His observation stuck in our minds because we had just had an example in our family. One of our sons was in middle school and we overheard him talking with some friends about a teacher they called Harry. We knew he didn’t have a teacher named Harry, and when we questioned him he cheerfully explained they called him Harry because his name was Dick. Adults are more likely to get this kind of emotional relief from sharing anecdotes about something stupid their boss did, from reading Dilbert cartoons, or from watching late-night-television comedians make fun of the rich and the powerful. Because young people know that making up hostile names for people is one of their techniques, Cynthia Voigt was especially effective in her negative portrayal of Tish’s abusive stepfather, Tonnie, in When She Hollers. Tonnie tries to humiliate Tish by reversing the sounds of her name. Perceptive readers understand from this incident that he is not only cruel but also immature. 4. People feel free to play with place names because they are not as sacred as they used to be. People are taking a fresh look at the names of towns and public buildings because commercial interests have entered the picture and naming rights are being sold for everything
Names and Naming in Young Adult Literature xiii from colleges to sports events, and from state highways to whole towns. One of the first towns to change its name for free publicity was Hot Springs, New Mexico, which in 1950 took the name of Truth or Consequences to pay the popular radio quiz show for broadcasting from their town. More recent changes that have been in the news include the town of Agra, Oklahoma, which temporarily changed its name to Viagra to get free concert tickets, and the town of Halfway, Oregon, which became Half.Com for one year in exchange for money and computers. Bigger stakes are involved when naming rights are sold for athletic facilities, such as here in Arizona where Bank One Ballpark, commonly called BOB, was changed to Chase Field because JPMorgan Chase & Co. purchased Bank One. Phoenicians are grateful that Chase Field at least sounds semantically connected to a sport, unlike athletic facilities in some cities that are now called Gillette Stadium, AT&T Park, and ALLTEL Stadium. Authors of books for teens are joining in thinking of new ways to get mileage out of place names. Brian Meehl’s Out of Patience is the humorous story of Jake Waters and his father’s dream of opening the American Toilet Museum in their hometown of Patience, Kansas, while the titles of Kate Kliss’s Deliver Us from Normal and Far from Normal were inspired by the town of Normal, Illinois, which like many streets and some U.S. towns, was given the name because it was home to a teachers college. Such schools used to be called Normal Schools. In 2002–2003, the name Paris became popular for girls because of Paris Hilton’s TV show The Simple Life. Other place names currently being given to both girls and boys include Montana, Dakota (Cody), Camden, and Madison. Some readers were surprised to learn that John Green’s Looking for Alaska, which won the 2006 Printz Award, was not a travel adventure but the story of Miles Halter’s first year at boarding school where he comes under the spell of Alaska Young, a girl described as “clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy.” 5. Young adult literature is contemporary and so can reflect current trends. One of the main reasons that teenagers enjoy reading YA literature, as opposed to the “classics” that are likely to be assigned in English classes, is that most of the authors are alive,
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