What's in a Name?

Recently in my creative writing classes, we've been considering the issue of names. The temptation for an author when trying to pick out a name for a character is to play the Dickens card. For example, if your character's a good guy, you want to call him "Mr. Goodman." Get it? This kind of cuteness becomes very au courant if you're one of those wink-nod po-mo type of writers for whom the whole thing's a joke anyway, so what's one more cheap ploy?

For me, the question of naming goes back to a fundamental issue of character: choice. We learn about characters from the choices they make. One thing that we as people have absolutely no choice over is the name our parents give us at birth. Also, at birth, our parents have no idea what kind of person we're going to be. We're just wet pink blobs. Therefore, using a name to signal some kind of trait about a character simply isn't true to life.

And yet, as one of my students pointed out, we as readers do get a kind of feeling for characters because of the names their authors (rather than their parents, since we as authors really are their parents) gave them. He pointed to the detective "Jack Bauer" on the program 24. Would Jack Bauer cut such a convincing figure as a detective if his name were "Worthington"? And as I mentioned in class, are we really prepared to accept a nuclear physicist named Tiffany?

Yes, argued a student who met with me later in office hours. Why not have a physicist named Tiffany? Why go the usual route and give her an intellectual-sounding name like Ernestine? Play with convention a little, and surprise your reader.

Jack or Worthington, Tiffany or Ernestine, either way naming comes back to the same core issue: we don't get to pick our names, so our names (by themselves) cannot tell us very much about the choices we'd make. Names can tell us gender, ethnicity, family heritage, sometimes age group, sometimes the type of family you grew up with (is your name John Marshall Scott III or Moonbeam Applebaum?). They can also tell us a lot about our parents, about the hopes they have for us, the way they go about choosing a name, the relatives they're honoring by naming us after them. But that's about it.

However, there is an important way in which names can tell us about character, which is, what is your character's relationship to his or her name? Does your character like her name? How does he feel when he hears it read aloud, on a class attendance list, for example? Does your character go by a nickname, and who chose that name? Does your character prefer the full version of his name, like Thomas, or does he go by Tom or Tommy for short? Does your character fantasize about changing his or her name? Does the name have a special meaning or story attached and does your character know it and tell it readily? This is all rich, fertile territory for name games.

If you happen to be a writer and still feel the Dickensian itch to get all cutsey with names then do me a favor. Give your character a nickname. Since the character's the one choosing it, you can go crazy. Think of Lewis "Scooter" Libby, for example. (What is it about a grown man who goes by the moniker "Scooter"?)

As for Tiffany the physicist, well, I'm still deciding...

A Comma Obsession

Yesterday I took a one-day cooking class to learn how to make a birthday cake. As part of the class, we learned how to wish someone a happy birthday in chocolate drizzle on top of a layer of buttercream frosting. Our teacher advised us to start with "Birthday" across the center of the cake, then to add "Happy" above that, and finally the person's name underneath.

In other words:

Happy
Birthday
Aaron

The one thing she didn't tell us to do was to insert a comma between "Birthday" and the person's name. I admit, it would certainly seem odd to come across a birthday cake that read:

Happy
Birthday,
Aaron

But the rules of grammar require a comma there, and not simply for the sake of fussiness. Consider the following two lines of dialogue:

1. "Leave Mom!"
2. "Leave, Mom!"

Without the rule about inserting a comma when a person is addressed by name in speech, how would we ever know if Mom was being asked to leave, or if someone else was being asked to leave his mother. Or try these two:

1. "Kill ducks!"
2. "Kill, ducks!"

Here the comma is a matter of life and death. In the first example, the ducks are about to become dead meat. In the second, the ducks become the killers.

I first learned about this comma (sometimes known as the comma of address) in an undergraduate fiction workshop I took at the University of Michigan with the writer Tish Ezekiel. Since then, I've become fairly religious about using it. I've also become unusually sensitive to its ever-increasing absence in other people's work, especially with work that's been published. An omitted comma of address strikes me as a sign that the writer doesn't care enough about her craft to learn the rules of grammar, doesn't care enough about the comfort of her readers to make the cadences of her dialogue absolutely clear.

True, these little commas are probably not the most egregious error a writer could make. Many times, we can guess pretty easily what the writer had in mind. "Hi Mom" instead of "Hi, Mom," doesn't seem like a huge mental leap. So why do I get so bothered when I see "Hi Mom"?

Because the comma is probably the most difficult of all punctuation marks to deploy correctly. In fact, there are some rules of comma usage that seem pretty much a matter of taste, without hard and fast rules to follow. So when there is a perfectly good hard and fast rule for using a comma, like the rule about commas of address, why not stick to it?