THE CHOICE OF NAMES.

Shannon News, 12 September 1924, Page 4

THE CHOICE OF NAMES.

In names, in all else, there are waves of popularity or neglect, so that those who have fashionable parents find when they grow up that thous-. artds of their contemporaries are also their namesakes, says the "Times.” This may be mildly annoying; the victims may complain that their fathers and mothers (who, poor souls, were only trying to be up-to-date), were, in fact, abominably unoriginal. But there are worse fates than the possession of a common name. Sometimes the, deed done at the font turns out to be an act of real and lasting presecution. The virtue of those who name a child, consists, then, chiefly in this —that they be not too precise. A m&ficful vagueness is required of them. They; may call a daughter Victoria, for that might well have happened at any time during more than sixty years, but to name her after a battle is to proclaim her age for ever to those who are uncharitable enough to look up the date. Similarly, it was open to any father about the tim e of the Armistice, to express his political enthusiasm by calling his son David, for there have been other Davids, and all the harpists in the world have not come out of Wales. But if there be any one now called Lloyd George Smith, he will probably curse v his parents’. thoroughness when in, perhaps the year 1930 he is forced to stand at the altar and begin in an audible voice, ‘‘l, Lloyd George . . . And his

embarrassment will be altogether independent of his opinion of the statesman. Inded, the higher his opinion, the greater may his embarrassment be. No one goes to sea without an admiration for Trafalgar, yet what cadet in his first term would not gink into the ground rather than aswer to the name of Horatio Nelson Whatnot? Horatio alone would be a little awkward, but there have, after all, been other Horatios, and the name is not intolerable, to a cadet, if tactfully diluted with a few incomspicuous Georges or Henrys. But add the great surname and the christening becomes a burden. Parents have no •right to saddle their children with their own enthusiasms or their own

exaggerated hopes. The way of kindness is to give a child a name which the future may either make freshly famous or may consign to an oblivion which at least is not ridiculous.