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Name Geekery
Saturday, 5 September 2009 17:28I've been thinking about old-fashioned men's names. Specifically, the kind that have transitioned to being almost exclusively women's names. There are a lot of them. It seems to be pretty much a one-way road; men's names can become unisex, and thence feminine, but not the other way around. Hillary and Evelyn are almost unheard of for contemporary boys (at least as far as I can tell), and "Meredith" is actually Welsh for "lord" and still used as such in Wales, but apparently not elsewhere.
Is it just me? Does anyone else know of a repository of boys who carry names that used to be considered exclusively feminine? It would make an interesting spec fic exercise, I think. Would a reader picking up a book that takes place in 2200 accept a male character named Rose, or Catherine? Would it work more easily with a name that isn't English, and so is less obviously feminine to an English-speaking audience? Or would that totally miss the point? It's pretty easy to do the reverse by using languages in which an "-a" suffix isn't feminizing, and that does tend to remind one that the linguistic conventions one knows don't always apply.
Anyway, I will go back to my book, where a gender-bending woman apparently takes the name Tamir, which might sound super-femme in English, but which makes me want to take a red pen to the book and correct it to Tmira. It means "tall", incidentally. And yes, in Hebrew, adjectives (as well as nouns and verbs) all have a feminine and masculine version, and using the wrong one sounds really weird.
Is it just me? Does anyone else know of a repository of boys who carry names that used to be considered exclusively feminine? It would make an interesting spec fic exercise, I think. Would a reader picking up a book that takes place in 2200 accept a male character named Rose, or Catherine? Would it work more easily with a name that isn't English, and so is less obviously feminine to an English-speaking audience? Or would that totally miss the point? It's pretty easy to do the reverse by using languages in which an "-a" suffix isn't feminizing, and that does tend to remind one that the linguistic conventions one knows don't always apply.
Anyway, I will go back to my book, where a gender-bending woman apparently takes the name Tamir, which might sound super-femme in English, but which makes me want to take a red pen to the book and correct it to Tmira. It means "tall", incidentally. And yes, in Hebrew, adjectives (as well as nouns and verbs) all have a feminine and masculine version, and using the wrong one sounds really weird.
