Brand (New) Name

Curiosity is limitless.  I live that every single day.  I wonder about the trivial and the profound. To further my curiosity, the web offers plenty to think about. 

I only wish I were smart enough to explain them all. 

Traditional names are part of the cultural landscapes.  But, within cultures, traditions are being challenged.

In the traditions in my small part of the old country, kids were named after the grandparents.  The first born is named after the paternal grandparent.  How about the second child?  It depends.  If the second child is the same sex, then the name is the maternal grandparent's name.  A different sex means that the first two kids have the names of the paternal grandparents.  The mother's lineage is for leftovers! 

But then the parents did not call their kids by those names.  In the joint-family environment, it was disrespectful for a son or a daughter-in-law to call out a name that could also be misunderstood as addressing the elder.  The kids, therefore, had an alias at home and among the extended family.

Urbanization changed the naming styles.  Shorter names were preferred in the urban(e) settings over the long, and old-styled, traditional names.

Going by the tradition, I would have been given the name Ramaswamy--my paternal grandfather's name.  But, I wasn't.  Capturing the "Ram" in Ramaswamy, I was named Sriram. 

I was also given an alias that was used in the formal, Hindu religious and ritualistic contexts: Venkataramasubramanian.  Boy am I glad that this multi-syllable name is not in the official records!

In the old country, the names of the kids of my younger cousins are nothing like the names around me when I was a kid.  I suppose by now even a name like mine has become old-fashioned.

The trend in my adopted country is no different.

Here in the US, too, it was not uncommon for kids to be named after grandparents and other close relations.

For much of American history, many people just named their kids after someone on the family tree, which helped keep names in circulation for a long time. This was especially true for baby boys, who have historically had less varied names than baby girls in part because they were more likely to inherit a family name.

Not anymore.

As family sizes shrunk and kids stopped doing labor, Americans “started to fixate on the uniqueness of each child,” as the sociologist Philip Cohen has written, and “individuality emerged as a project—starting with naming—of creating an identity.” Meanwhile, society was becoming more casual, and people were less likely to address each other by their surname. As Evans pointed out, this made differentiating your first name from others’ more important.

Uniqueness is what matters now.  Your name is a brand, or could potentially be one.

American naming is now in a phase where distinctiveness is a virtue, which is a departure from the mid-century model of success: Today, you excel not by fitting in, but by standing out. “Parents are thinking about naming kids more like how companies think about naming products, which is a kind of competitive marketplace where you need to be able to get attention to succeed”.

The names of African-Americans. who are descendants of people enslaved by whites, have been unique for quite some time now, way before whites and others started searching for unique names for their kids.  During this Black History Month, this explainer on "Black" sounding names is an appropriate way to end this curiosity-driven post on names.