Words and Stuff
‘Can you believe it? They’ve called the baby Egbert.’ Or Mildred, or Cyril, or Chardonnay, or any number of other names we cannot stand but, mysteriously, our friends or our children seem to favour. If we haven’t said it ourselves, we’ve heard others who have.
Our dislikes are no doubt formed by the association of names with characters, real or fictional, who have borne them – that annoying Damian we sat next to in primary school, the goody-goody Beth in Little Women or the dreadful Miles who preceded you in your wife’s affections.
Some of our likes may come about in the same way, borrowed from hunks, heroes or even princesses. Many a Meghan will be christened this year, and perhaps Jeremy will spread from Paxmanland and County Clarkson to Corbynist communes.
But not all fashions can be predicted. The middle-class taste for taking aristocratic family names as boys’ first names in the 18th and 19th centuries is a case in point. It’s easy to see why admirers of Robert Clive (of India) or, later, fans of Bertrand Russell might transfer a great nobleman’s surname to their offspring. And since family surnames often become forenames, it’s also easy to see why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s parents might call him Percy, the family name of the dukes of Northumberland, to whom the Shelleys were distantly related. But the popularity of Cecil (family name of the marquesses of Salisbury), Howard (dukes of Norfolk), Nevill (marquesses of Abergavenny) and Spencer (earls) is less readily explained. As for the post-1880 fashion for Stanley, it may owe more to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley than to the earls of Derby.
An earlier fashion, after a long run, seems to be in decline. During the Reformation, English Puritans saw themselves as too pious for saints’ names and wanted to set their children up for life, or death, with ‘virtue’ names. Most of the stranger ones, such as Abuse-not, Fie-fornication and The-lord-is-near, died out after the Civil War, but many others lived on. Faith, Hope and Charity were the ‘Christian’ virtues, fortified by Plato’s ‘Cardinal Virtues’ of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. Most were bestowed pretty freely.
I have a Hope among my friends under ten, and a Grace among the dogs I know (alas, also called Disgrace). The Constances and Honors are rather older, and the Faiths, Joys, Prudences and Veritys are verging on the antique; Comfort is dead. Virtue names are more