Tomorrow is my late grandmother’s birthday, either her 105th or her 112th, depending on which record one believes, but the Internet has settled on both the birth year she preferred and the name she wanted people to call her. She hated her first name so much that it didn’t make it onto her tombstone.
I understand the feeling. I have had periods in my professional life when using my middle name felt easier, and just as many when keeping that unmistakably feminine name under wraps seemed like the better idea. I use both professionally these days, since I no longer care as much about blending in as I used to (except when I totally do). Also, my social media presence is just enough that people usually don’t expect a dude to show up when I interview for a job. Usually. It’s been … a while … since I’ve had to say “I’m a guy? Huh. I guess this explains some things.” or “Oh, no, you’re right. I am a guy. I just had a really good plastic surgeon. He even gave me a Caesarian scar. Wanna see it?”
Ironically, if I had a daughter, I probably would have given her the name my grandmother canceled as one of hers, totally wrecking our primary resolution that we didn’t plan to name our son after any relatives, dead, living, or somewhere in between. The secondary resolution: our son wasn’t going to be named after anyone we knew, have a name patched together from our first or middle names, or required an apostrophe to spell.
My husband also had a ‘not so many dang vowels, Shai!’ rule, too, but I had planned to ignore it.
Between those resolutions and not wanting him to give him a name that ended with ‘n’ or wouldn’t get him beat up on a playground … boy howdy, it was a headache, but I guess that’s what we deserved for overthinking it instead of just naming him after someone on television, like our mothers named us.
To be honest, all of our media-based names failed those criteria (even Marcus Cole, Miles [O’]Brien, and Malcolm Reed!) except for Elim Garak.1
I then imagined a future hypothetical elementary school conversation like this:
Teacher: Is ‘Elim’ short for anything?
EGN: I don’t know. It’s not the Hebrew ‘Elim’, even though my folks like Oasis. *sings* Sooooo, your ice cream must wait/Until the peas on your plate aren’t going nowhere…
Teacher: Uh … and how are those related2…
EGN: Mom says it could be from ‘Eliminate enemies by all means necessary’.
Teacher: Uh…
EGN: My parents named me after a spy-assassin from an old show they liked to watch.
Teacher: They thought he was a good role model?
EGN: Yeah! He was clever, eloquent, resilient, knew how to cut in a straight line…
Teacher: …and eliminated his enemies by all means necessary.
EGN: *smiles cheerfully*
So, we didn’t use that name. My grandmother’s ghost is … possibly grateful? Hard to say. I’m sure if she had gotten to meet my son, she would have loved him in her quietly intimidating way, no matter what we had named him.
Though if he was named after Garak, I would have told her ‘Elim’ was from Exodus 15:27, yep, and ‘Garak’ is from my husband’s relatives. There are absolutely so many Cardassians running around Northeast PA. Totally.
What? She terrified me. Happy Birthday, Mema.
- Our son was born before Mass Effect was released. Otherwise, he could have been Shepard Garrus or Thane Shepard. If he’d been a girl, Kara (from the Battlestar Galactica reboot of Starbuck) would have been a contender. ↩︎
- Exodus 15:27. And they came to Elim, where were twelve wells of water, and threescore and ten palm trees: and they encamped there by the waters. ↩︎
Modus Dementi 