My first name was invented by the 16th century poet, Sir Philip Sidney for his long pastoral poem Arcadia. Presumably, it means “filled with honey.”
It got picked up again in the 18th century by Samuel Richardson, as the name of a virtuous teenage servant girl who spends much of the novel being sexually assaulted, kidnapped, and imprisoned by her upper-class, “importunate” employer. I took a stab at reading it when I was fifteen. A quarter of the way through, exasperated, I flipped to the end, learned the “happy” ending is that she marries the man and reforms him with her piety, and gave it all up as a bad idea. I wish I could say I was indignant as an incipient feminist whose keen insight cut brutally through the romantic conventions of the time, but I wasn’t. I just didn’t believe a word.
At the time I was born, the name my mother chose for me was at the height of its popularity, though I don’t think she knew that. It was her third choice. Her first was flatly and reasonably rejected by my father because, coupled with my surname, it would have doomed me to a lifetime of bad jokes. Her second would have made my full name sound like someone walking through slush. So she chose another name she liked, it worked, and now it’s mine.
It’s not exactly exotic. There was always at least one other girl with my first name at school. When I moved to San Francisco in my twenties, there was another woman here with both my name and surname. We never met, but we did keep stumbling across each other when we applied for library and video rental cards.
The advent of the internet revealed just how common is my full name. At one point, in my forties, I got a cluster of emails congratulating me on graduating high school and asking when I would come visit relatives in Israel. I wrote back, explained my location and age, and then, rather tentatively, asked how anyone with my Irish surname ended up in Israel.
The response I got was polite, amused and kind. Theirs was a shortened version of the name of a shtetl in eastern Europe, that, in turn was named after the French city from which its population had been driven after a pogrom — the same city that had given my family its name. So, the email writer observed, if our ancestors had not been relatives, they had been neighbors.
I believe I sent back thanks and an apology for my forebears.
Pam Troy 