Karl Dallas writes: | I didn't realise I was that easy to find! :-) I was startled to read in | one newsgroup a couple of years ago that I was dead! But that rumour's | been much exaggerated [(c) Samuel Clemens]! ... Jack Campin wrote: | Ursula Le Guin came up with a far-ahead-of-her-time idea in "The | Dispossessed", where people were allocated a randomly generated | unique-but-pronounceable string as their name. If I was looking | for names for a child now I'd make sure their middle name was | something like Maxtiplod or Zabbarooda.
I've read a few similar comments about the practice among much of the American black population of giving their children original names that aren't like anything you've ever heard. There are multiple explanations of this. The most likely is the long period when their ancestors were kept illiterate, forcing a purely aural culture on them. Combine with this the confusion of being surrounded by other groups that spoke several languages (English, French, Spanish, Cherokee, Nahuatl, whatever), plus ancestors and newcomers from Africa with a variety of names, and you easily get a jumble of names with no obvious patterns. But a common current explanation is the benefit of having a unique name: It's difficult for the legal system to mistake you for another. This can be important when your group is a special target of the legal system. A recent example was the 2000 Florida election fiasco. A lot of black people were prevented from voting because they had the same name as someone who had been convicted of a crime (sometimes in another state). It seems that people running polling places often just had big printouts of the names of "convicted criminals". If your name was on the list, you did't get in. Having an unusual name helps a lot in such a political culture. Even better is a unique name. (Not sure what this has to do with music copyrights, though. ;-) To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
