Everything in a Name
HERE are those who sneer at the morning serials, but I feel that there can be nothing intrinsically tawdry about dramas which give their heroines such good wholesome names. I don’t think I have ever met in a morning serial a name that would send a mother rushing to the registrar now and raise a blush on a youthful cheek in twenty years’ time-you still have to get your more exotic names, your Cressidas and Imogens and Mirandas, from Shakespeare via beauty-parlour fiction. Peg haps writers of radio serials are com scious of the need for a name with good wearing qualities, a name that will come trippingly from the tongue four days out of seven for fifty-two weeks of the year. Hence the popularity of Ruth-short, sweet and sturdywhich rose to fame with Big Sister, and is being aired currently in The House of Conflict. Mary and Barbara are firm favourites, and Jane comes in for quite a lot of wear and tear. When a name with fewer associations is required writers still resist the urge to do anything really fancy-Rita Mars-
den is, I think, the nearest they got to it-but continue along the straight and narrow with names we wouldn’t choose like ‘Lilian, Mildred and
Eleanor.
M.
B.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 667, 18 April 1952, Page 11
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215Everything in a Name New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 667, 18 April 1952, Page 11
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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