Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (98 page)
It is not a bad plan for girls to have only one name, so that they may retain their maiden surname after their marriage, as that honored lady, Mrs. Harriet
Beecher
Stowe, has done.
2
But this English commendation of Mrs. Stowe’s example has not been followed by imitation.
3
Nor does an English grass-widow, on getting rid of her husband,
John
, cease, in the American fashion, to be Mrs.
John
Smith and become Mrs.
Jones
Smith, the
Jones
being her maiden surname. The American custom of representing a middle name by its simple initial, though it is not altogether unknown in Britain, is not common, and such a form as
George B
. Shaw would strike most Englishmen as odd. Said Simeon Strunsky in one of his “Topics of the Times” columns in the New York
Times:
4
This middle initial in American personal names continues to puzzle the British mildly and amuses them enormously. The late G. K. Chesterton was always writing about American multi-millionaires called
Philoxenus K. Hunks
, in which most of the fun was in the middle
K
. The serious Englishman simply drops the middle letter and speaks of Mr.
Myron
Taylor or Mr.
William
Tilden, Jr. When an American spells out his middle name, as in William
Allen
White or James
Branch
Cabell the English drop the first name and say
Allen
White or
Branch
Cabell. The gentleman from Emporia still calls himself
William
, but Mr. Cabell has actually gone over to the British practice and dropped his
James
.
5
The practice is becoming common over here.
We must not call it British obtuseness. Perhaps the people over there are misled by the habit of our Presidents,
Grover
Cleveland,
Woodrow
Wilson
and
Calvin
Coolidge; so the British fail to see why not
Myron
Taylor or
William
Bullitt.
1
Camden says that second given-names were “rare in England” in his time,
c
. 1605, though common in the Catholic countries. James I had been christened
Charles James
and his son was
Henry Frederick
, but it was not until his other son, later Charles I, married
Henrietta Maria
of France in 1625 that they came into any popularity. Even so, they were confined for a long while to the gentry. In America they were adopted only slowly. The first graduate of Harvard to have one is said to have been
Anmi Ruhamah
Corlet, who set up as a schoolmaster at Plymouth, Mass., in 1672. Mr. Gustavus Swift Paine, of Southbury, Conn., who has made an extensive study of nomenclature on Cape Cod, tells me that middle names were not in general use there until late in the Eighteenth Century. Before then, he says,
the naming of children was something like this: Frequently, but not always, the first son was named after the father’s father or the mother’s father; the first daughter was named after the father’s mother or the mother’s mother; the second son and daughter were named after the grandparents previously neglected; then the next children were named after the father and mother. If a child died in infancy its name was often repeated for the next child of that sex, and sometimes three or four were thus given the same name successively. Some children were named after brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, of the parents. When middle names came in, the mother’s family name was often thus preserved in the naming of offspring. Sometimes, however, a child was named after an admired friend or distant relative.
Of all the remembered worthies of the early days only
John Quincy
Adams,
2
Robert Treat
Paine and the two Virginia Lees,
Richard Henry
and
Francis Lightfoot
, had middle names,
3
and of the first seventeen Presidents only
John Quincy
Adams,
William Henry
Harrison and
James Knox
Polk. They were more numerous among the literati,
e.g., James Fenimore
Cooper,
Nathaniel Parker
Willis,
Francis Scott
Key,
Charles Brockden
Brown and
William Ellery
Channing, but so late as 1859 they were still rare enough in the general population, even on the educated level, for a writer in
Harper’s Magazine
to be arguing that they should be bestowed more frequently. He said:
We might very easily, and perhaps wisely, revive the Roman usage, and give children, besides their own proper name and that of the family, a middle name, taken from the most important ancestor or the most characteristic branch that has been grafted into the family tree. No harm would be done if several, or even all the children had the same middle name. The mother’s own family name may furnish the needed cognomen; and if variety is needed, it may be, according to a frequent classic usage, found in the name of the father’s mother or the mother’s mother, so as to perpetuate in the children the ancestral surnames of the paternal and maternal side. Such a custom does good by cherishing a proper family feeling, and suggesting the important truth that a man’s blood is a fact significant enough to be looked after, whether to correct failings or to encourage virtues that run in its arteries.
1
In late years there have been three curious tendencies in the naming of American children: (
a
) the growing popularity of nicknames as given-names, (
b
) the bestowal of mere initials on boys instead of names, and (
c
) the fashion for inventing new and unprecedented names for girls, often of an unearthly and supercolossal character. All three tendencies are most marked among the evangelical tribesmen of the South and Southwest. Until the political explosion of 1946 the Texan who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives, officially the third in rank among all American statesmen, described himself in the Congressional Directory as
Sam
– not as
Samuel
but as plain
Sam
—, and under his eye, when an appropriation bill was on its passage and all hands crowded up to vote, were two other
Sams
, five
Freds
, four
Joes
, two
Eds
, two
Wills
, a
Pat
, a
Pete
, a
Ben
, a
Mike
, a
Sol
, a
Thad
, a
Fritz
, a
Dan
, a
Jack
, a
Nat
, a
Jed
, a
Jere
, a
Jerry
, a
Cliff
, a
Newt
and a
Harve
. Many of these homespun Hampdens succumbed to the explosion aforesaid, but even in the Eightieth Congress, with its Republican majority,
2
there were five
Freds
, three
Joes
, two
Sams
, two
Mikes
, and a
Jack
, a
Wat
, an
Abe
, a
Walt
, a
Si
, a
Cliff
, a
Jere
, a
Ben
, an
Ed
, a
Chet
, a
Hal
, a
Pete
, a
Jay
, a
Ray
, a
Toby
, a
Tom
, a
Harry
, a
Sid
, a
Harve
, a
Jamie
and a
Runt
,
3
though
Sam
the Speaker had returned to the floor and was displaced by a sedate
Joseph
from Massachusetts.
Nor were all of these bob-tailed brethren Southerners: some came from the outposts of Biblical science in the upper Middle West and on the Pacific coast and several actually emanated from Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
It is in the South, however, that such stable-names are most frequently conferred upon he-babies at the sacrament of baptism. I turn to the Register of the Texas Christian University for 1942–43 and find two
Joes
, two
Dons
, a
Jack
, a
Fred
, a
Herb
, a
Sam
, a
Harry
and a
Bob
among the students listed upon a single page.
1
I linger a bit in the same instructive work and find an
Ed
, a
Dan
and a
Harry
among the trustees and a
Lew
, a
Mack
, a
Fred
and a
Will
on the faculty. I reach into my collectanea and bring forth a
Lum
,
2
an
Artie
, an
Andy
, a
Dick
, a
Dolph
, a
Cal
, a
Bennie
, a
Bernie
, a
Charley
,
3
a
Zach
,
4
a
Gene
,
5
a
Billie
, an
Alex
, a
Louie
, an
Eddie
, a
Jimmie
, an
Archie
, a
Terry
,
6
a
Phil
, a
Link
, a
Jeffie
,
7
a
Josh
,
8
a
Larry
, a
Sammy
,
9
a
Hy
, a
Jess
,
10
a
Nels
,
11
a
Jed
,
12
a
Nat
,
13
a
Bert
, a
Fritz
, a
Johnnye
,
14
a
Wash
,
15
an
Edd
,
16
a
Ned
,
17
an
Ollie
18
and a
Gus
.
19
Nearly all these names
come from official records, in which both given-names and surnames are recorded with care.
1
The custom of giving boys simple initials instead of given-names
2
is not quite new, but it seems to have been growing rapidly of late, especially in the South. The President of the United States at the time I write is the Hon. Harry S. Truman of Missouri, whose middle initial, according to the Associated Press,
is just an initial – it has no name significance. It represents a compromise by his parents. One of his grandfathers had the first-name of
Solomon;
the other,
Shippe
. Not wanting to play favorites the President’s parents decided on the
S
.
3
Mr. Truman was born in 1884, when the custom under discussion was in its cradle days, but he had forerunners. One of them may have been U. S. Grant, for Captain Charles King says in “The True Ulysses S. Grant,” published in 1915: “Grant was never formally baptized until late in life, and then, by his own choice, as
Ulysses S
. He would not take the full [middle] name of
Simpson
[the surname of his mother], but elected to be baptized as he had been so long and well known to the nation.”
4
In the generation
between Grant’s and Truman’s there were a number of conspicuous Americans bearing initials as given names,
e.g., W J
(no periods) McGee, the anthropologist (1853–1912), and
D-Cady
Herrick, candidate for the governorship of New York in 1904 (1846–1926). Also, there have been others among Mr. Truman’s contemporaries,
e.g
., Ferris
J
Stephens, curator of the Babylonian collection at Yale;
1
Dr.
J
Milton Cowan, secretary of the Linguistic Society of America, who signs himself
J M.;
2
J
Spencer Weed, former president of the National Horse Show;
DR
Scott, of the University of Missouri;
3
Mrs.
Bj
Kidd, secretary of the Advertising Federation of America and a well-known writer of and on advertising,
4
and the late
Ed L
Keen, vice-president of the United Press.
5
But the fashion
for giving boys initials instead of given-names did not make any progress among the plain people until the interval between the two World Wars. By the time World War II was on us it had developed so vastly that the Army and Navy had to devise means of dealing with it, to avoid uncertainty and confusion. The Navy’s plan was to distinguish between simple initials and those representing actual names by enclosing the former in quotation marks, without periods,
e.g
., “
C
” “
L
” Keedy, Frank “
A
” Downs, Harold “
B
” “
J
” Barnes, Herbert J. “
A
” Hillson and John “
C
” S. Coffin.
1
The Army, in the early days of World War II, marked off the bearers of initials by inserting (
IO
),
i.e
., initials only, between the initials and the surnames, and used (
NMI
),
i.e
., no middle initial, after the given-names of those who had but one. But by Army Regulation No. 345–1, March 11, 1944, these marks were abandoned, and
John James Jones
and
J J Jones
both became
Jones, J. J
.
2
The craze for afflicting girl babies with bizarre and unheard of given-names is a phenomenon of relatively recent years and is principally manifest, as I have noted, in the South and the rural Middle West, but it appeared sporadically in the North before the Civil War, and the swarming of the underprivileged before and during World War II carried it to the Pacific Coast. In a list of “the most usual names” of American women, published in an 1814 edition of Webster’s Spelling Book the 69 names given included such old favorites as
Ann, Dorothy, Elizabeth, Helen, Jane, Katharine, Margaret
and
Mary
, along with such Puritan survivals as
Abigail, Deborah, Faith, Priscilla, Prudence
and
Temperance
, but the utmost advance of fancy forms was represented by
Clarissa, Huldah
and
Susannah
, none of them novel. In 1834, however, Longworth’s Directory listed
Aletta, Blandina, Coritha, Dovinda, Elima, Hilah, Keturah, Parnethia
and
Zina
.
3
This was a beginning, and in a little while there were contemporary Connecticut records of
Minuleta, Typhosa, Irista, Zeriah
and
Wealthena
– all of them worthy of the best efforts of an Oklahoma mother today.
4
Other name-lists of the
1840–60 period show
Rodintha, Finette, Sula, Delvina, Luzertta, Auria, Calina, Milma
,
1
Isaphene, Algeline, Levantia
and
Philena
.
2
After the Civil War there was a great access of romanticism in all departments of American life, and the naming of infants marched shoulder to shoulder with the crocheting of tidies and the jig-saw adornment of suburban villas. Says Van Wyck Brooks: