An investment well-made, Mrs. Hurley says. I can tell this baby’s got it all—even the name. I once had a friend who named her little girl Candy. Their last name was Suprise. Not surprise, mind you. Suprise, without the first “r.” Boy was she gorgeous.

There’s a lot in a name, Stacy says. I mean, can you imagine a Jean Biggie? Or an Alice? You need all the help you can get in this life.

What’s in a name? As Stacy says in “Starr Biggie,” can anyone imagine a Jean Biggie rather than a Star Biggie? Is there a connotative, even personal-enhancing, difference between the two, especially when the intent implies advantage, prestige, recognition, even personal gain?

Certainly, there are the accidental and somewhat amusing pairing of names with occupations: Dr. Blood (a physician); Dr. Slaughter (a surgeon); or Dr. Fecher (dog psychologist). These coincidental couplings of like names and jobs are almost guaranteed to produce a chuckle tinged with a slight tint of irony yet offering scant ‘linguistic transcendence’. But if, as the Bard says, a “rose smells like a rose by any other name,” the consensus by those who desire to ‘smell’ competitively better in the discerning nose of public opinion are inevitably compelled to tweak their mundane birth names to enhance their personal appeal on the open market. Thus, Henry John Deutschendorf becomes John Denver, and the American film actress, born Constance Frances Marie Ockelman, was known professionally as Victoria Lake. A rose, then, may just smell best when sonorously declared a ‘rose’ after all.

But the intentional and transformational renaming of things, places and people for one’s own personal redemption (or gain) is often without the consent of the rose, per se. The sound of a word—its resonance, assonance, dissonance—defies quantification (definition), and no one can rationally discern the qualitative difference between the articulated sound of Angel Fish and Scrod, although both may designate the same species of fish. But humans are not fish. And the reader might be inclined to judge Stacy’s calculating, self-serving selection of nomenclature for her infant daughter as either ‘petty vicarious ambition’ or, sympathetically, outright ‘pathos.’ After all, who would not at least regard Stacy’s genuine (even desperate) utterance: You need all the help you can get in this life. 

First Published in Greensboro Review, Literary Magazine of University of North Carolina, USA