All About Your Name

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HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Do you still write letters? I mean, letter-letters? It’s difficult for me, because my handwriting is so illegible, I honestly get emails from people saying “Thank you for your thank you note. What did it say?”

But the other day I participated in an astonishing event. Sponsored by Women of Letters, it’s an international program that asks women to write a letter on the topic of WOL’s choice, then read it out loud to an audience. 

I was thrilled to be invited. Until I heard their topic. We had to write “A Letter to My Secret.” My secret? It took a lot of thinking. And at some point, I was dismayed (?) to realize I have no real juicy secrets. I guess that’s a good thing—no, like, criminal record, or almost criminal record, no horrible encounters or crushing humiliating miseries. Any secret I thought of was—embarrassing. Or boring. Or embarrassing AND boring.

And then I got it. I would reveal—that I do not like my name.

Here’s a photo of us all on stage.

My letter began like this:

To: Whom it may concern:

Yes, I understand where you're coming from, completely. Because let me tell you, Whom, I never liked my name either. "Whom it may concern" works really well for you, and I wish I had thought of it. But I have had to make other arrangements

And then it went on:

It was 1963, remember. And it was bad enough being considered a farm girl when I wasn't, but what made it worse that was that my name was Harriet Ann.  Harriet Ann! 

When all the cool girls are Debbie and Linda, and you are nerdy bookie and unpopular, and named Harriet, it does not make for a pleasant junior high experience. In fact, when all I wanted to be was most popular, they voted me most individual. Harriet the individual. And they put my picture in the school paper upside down. They would not have done that to Debbie or Linda.

I could not understand why my obviously sadistic parents named me this. They tried to explain it, that it was a family thing, that my father, my biological father, was the music critic for the Chicago Daily News, and my great uncle Harry, or something like that, had introduced him to the music of Mozart. So they had, in gratitude, named me after him. Uncle Harry, not Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Which would have been equally horrible.

I did my best, as geeky little Harriet, to overcome this name thing. Oh, you're saying, how about Harriet the Spy? She was cool. Yes she was, and had Harriet the Spy existed at this time, I would've been fine. And writing you about something else.  But there was no other Harriet except for Ozzie and Harriet. Ricky Nelson's mother? Are you kidding me?

It went on—we each read for about 8 minutes. (And I mentioned Harriet Vane, of course.) But wow, it was a memorable evening. 

I ended by revealing how I kinda like Harriet now.

Here’s another photo—this is me backstage with host Sofija Stephanovic, then Abeer Hoque and Callie Crossley,  then me, then Marianne Leone, Rose Styron and Claire Messud. 

And if you EVER get a chance to attend a Women of Letters event—we had a packed house at Oberon in Cambridge—please do. 

We’re not allowed to talk about what anyone else told—what happens at WOL stays at WOL. 

But people were laughing, and crying, and it was truly unforgettable. 

So Reds and readers—I won’t ask you to tell your secret. Not today at least. But—do you like your name? Have you always felt that way? What do you wish you were named?

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"Wassup?" She emoted.

RHYS BOWEN:  At one stage on Jungle Red we tried to keep Tuesday as a literary-related day, so I'm restoring that idea with some musings about language.

There are many reasons I enjoy setting my books in the first half of the Twentieth Century and I was reminded of one of them yesterday when I was watching TV and a character said ‘Yo. Wassup?”

I realized how far our use of language has sunk since the times I write about. People in those days had large vocabularies. They engaged in unhurried conversation. They read. They listened to books being read to them and they had time to express themselves eloquently. They wrote long, descriptive letters to each other. I still have some letters that my grandmother and great aunt wrote. They begin, “My dearest sister. I hope missive finds you in good health. As I pick up my pen to write to you I send you my fondest thoughts of greeting winging their way across the miles to you. “

               

 All that instead of “Wassup?” They had time, you see. They could not phone, text or even see each other often, so letters were important. My great-grandmother decided to go to Australia when she was in her eighties. In those days that meant goodbye forever and a letter from home would take several months. I’ve often thought how poignant it must have been that a loved one might not know for a long time that their relative across the world was sick or even dead. They wouldn’t know of a new baby or a marriage. No wonder letters were so detailed, so expressive.

                What a contrast to our means of expression today. Seriously I think we are reverting to the stone age. Wassup is only one step away from pointing at the mouth and grunting when we want food.

My personal pet peeve is the phrase “My bad.”

My bad what? When did bad stop being an adjective and turn into a noun?

When people today say “My bad,” my characters would have said, “I’m frightfully sorry but in a momentary lapse of concentration I seem to have knocked over my glass and spilled a few drops of liquid on your skirt. I must apologize most profusely.”

Another pet peeve is “No problem.”

I asked a passing waiter if he would refill my water glass and he said “No problem.”

Of course there’s no problem, I wanted to yell. It’s your job to fill water glasses. That is why you are walking around with a pitcher.

I seriously believe that some of the problems of troubled youth come because they simply cannot express themselves eloquently. They don’t have the vocabulary to tell others what they fell.

“Know what I mean? Know what I mean?” They demand and unfortunately we don’t know what they mean because they can’t tell us.

The interesting thing is that in the times I write about—the 1900s through the 1930s a good vocabulary wasn’t just confined to the upper classes. Read the diaries of women in the Westward movement. So expressive and touching as they described the death of a child, the loneliness of the wilderness.  And read the works of Frederick Douglass, a black slave. Majestic prose.

So where did we go wrong? Is it that we are so short of time these days? That children are not encouraged to read? That families don’t have time to converse? That we are so addicted to our iPhones that we will soon be speaking entirely in texting shortcuts? I heart U2.

I’m going back to the nineteen thirties now and not one of my characters will say “Like” and “Y’know.” Or even Wassup?

So do you have any pet peeves about our modern vocabulary, or lack thereof?

RH