Untitled
(an essay by any other name would probably smell different)
Author’s Note
The following is a meandering essay about names and naming. Like many autoethnographic, diaristic and borderline self-indulgent pieces penned by my ilk (Jewish millennial girls, gays and theys) it begins with a tiny personal problem and ends with the Holocaust.
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I thought the earring hole on my right ear was closing, even though it’s been pierced since I was seven and I don’t think it’s physically possible for a twenty plus year-old hole to close. Basically, I’d have to work hard to force an earring through and by the time I got one in, my ear would be red and sore and sometimes it would bleed a little. After two years of this struggle I realized that it wasn’t closing, but rather the obstruction, or, I guess, the presumed obstruction, was due to the canal of the hole somehow shifting direction. Now instead of going straight back, my earring hole veers to the left, just like my vagina.
I wrote those first few sentences not knowing for sure if my vagina veers to the left. I know it veers one of the ways, but I had forgotten which way, and it isn’t noticeable until I use my Diva Cup. Anything else that gets inserted seems to go straight back, but the Diva Cup must go in at the direction of the whole structure for it to work properly. I got my period yesterday, so I was finally able to check and it turns out I was correct. My right earring hole and my vagina both veer, rather dramatically, leftward.
The brand name, Diva Cup makes me want to die and I can’t be the only one. Contrary to popular belief, I do not identify as a diva. Icon, maybe, but certainly not diva. I tried to replace all prior mentions of the Diva Cup in this piece with the more neutral, “menstrual cup”, but that sounded strangely formal. Medical, even. There is something about using brand names in storytelling that gives the narrative texture, even if those brand names are girlbossing themselves into misogynist oblivion. The names ground the text in the world and act like a small acknowledgement that we are all part of a club with special names for things. And in a sense, we are if we’re all in agreement that participating in capitalism is a kind of club. This is probably why No Name is so successful. Its generic frugality feels anti-capitalist (one club) while still dosing consumers with that snug safe feeling of engaging with an established brand (another club).
In grade four, I got really into memorizing commercials. I remember the one I had down best was for Huggies, which is even more random than it sounds because my only sibling is not much younger than me and there were no other babies in my life whose basic needs I thought about. I had no conscious experience or understanding around the nuances of diaper purchasing, and yet I was completely off book on the Huggies commercial. I even added my own choreography and verbal flourishes to the performance of reciting it. While I don’t recall why I was doing this, I’d venture a guess that they’re incessantness, inescapability and inherent catchiness rendered commercials worth memorizing to my child brain. In hindsight though, I do believe part of it was about experimenting with what it might feel like to exist in the tantalizing adult consumer world.
It was also a parodic exercise, she says, likely giving her child self’s sense of humour way too much credit. By that age I knew that commercials, with their catchy jingles and bright colours, were made to be manipulative and I also knew that being manipulated was something I should try to not be. So, by memorizing them, by repeating those brand names over and over, I think on some level, I was also purposely making fun of them. These companies spent millions wanting me to know their names, and I said sure, no problem, I’ll know you backwards and forwards and yet, I will not buy you because I am nine.
Almost two decades later, I found myself participating in another name game. In 2021, as my now husband and I settled into first-time cohabitation and began, what the most depraved among us would call, “adulting,” we became utterly obsessed with dogs. We had complete baby fever for dogs even though neither of us ever had one and collectively had zero experience ever taking care of one. This lack of lived experience, coupled with our double Gemini tendency toward both language-based games and surface level chit chat, meant our dog obsession mostly took the form of coming up with awesome dog names. It is not an exaggeration to say we talked about possible dog names daily, perhaps even multiple times a day. It border(collied) (so sorry) on an addiction. It was a comedic and creative exercise, she says, likely giving her 28-year-old self’s sense of humour too much credit. And since we we’re in a financial, mental and physical place where actual dog ownership seemed viable, the stakes of the name game we’re tantalizingly real. So real, in fact, that upon reflection, it seems to me that our constant name brainstorming was probably a sublimation of our anxieties around being adequate pet parents and, perhaps, adults in general. Finding the most adorable, unique and nickname-able dog name would surely set us up for success in the rest of dog ownership. Right? Right?????
Naming things is a paradox. It means you understand the thing enough to make it simple and concise and yet it also complicates the thing because you’ve added to its identity as a future autonomous being. You’ve created distance from the thing while securing its future as never again being completely apart from you.
What I’m trying to say here is I think using a specific name makes the named thing feel manageably embodied, as if it could comfortably exist inside you among the constellation of other language-bound objects that arrange and rearrange themselves into the shape of your life.
For as long as I can remember, my dad would do this thing where, when he’d talk to us about summer camp, he’d use everyone’s first names or nicknames even though we, his children and audience, didn’t know any of these people. The effect was such that these mononyms seemed like characters in the great screenplay that was Camp Winnebago 1973, which, knowingly to my dad who surely did this on purpose, made for some pretty excellent storytelling.
When I was twenty-one, while visiting a friend at her parents’ house in Miami, I noticed that her mom, a middle-age liberal Jew cut from similar cloth as my dad, did the same thing and talked about camp people using one name only. It retained the endearing, cinematic quality I’d grown accustomed to from my dad and since then, I’ve also played around with this storytelling technique when speaking about camp. I could be wrong, but I believe most people, regardless of cultural background, also think it’s affective and charming. Maybe it’s because it makes people think of the movie Wet Hot American Summer or a Mordechai Richler book. Something about it is just so Richler! Which is a pedantic way of saying, it feels so Jewish, which is what I really mean.
I always read the acknowledgements in books and often, they make me cry. I usually mosey on over to the acknowledgments page towards the end of the first trimester of a book, when I’ve committed to seeing it through and want to know more about the creator of the text that I will accompany me to breakfast for the next couple weeks. Something I’ve noticed about acknowledgements is authors tend not to use people’s last names when they’re acknowledging them. And if they do use last names, they will usually change form in the last paragraph, when parents, partners or children are thanked and then use first names only because, presumably, these people are far too familiar for last names.
Reading acknowledgments and running my eyes over the list of key mononyms feels like learning a fun secret or being let in on important information. Or like listening to a middle-aged Jewish person talk about summer camp. Or like being part of a club, which, if you’ll recall the first bit of this essay, is very desirable to me. It makes me feel closer to the book and to the author to know for certain they inhabit a world with individual characters who play distinct, nurturing roles, and who are simply too woven into the fabric of the author’s being to be bogged down with more than one perfect name. To know that such a world for sure exists for someone I do not know is one of my ultimate comforts. I think because while I do often inhabit a similarly supportive world, I fear it will be fleeting. To see the specific network of care and support that can bring about a creative project so eternally in writing makes me feel like such a thing could perhaps be permanent.
I’ve never had a real nickname. In high school, I got close with “Lo” because there was a Lauren in the grade above me who people called Lo, so occasionally friends would try it out with me, but it didn’t stick. Sometimes male counsellors at camp (Andy, Gotty, Luddy etc.) would call me by my last name, but that was few and far between. I’m not really a “last name” girl and by that I mean nobody has ever tried to get my attention for the sole purpose of throwing or catching a ball on a whim. I’m currently in my oldest friends’ phone as LaLa, although she’s never called me that. If I had to guess why, I think she went with LaLa for the same reason authors will almost always drop last name usage in the last paragraph of their acknowledgements. There are other Laurens in my friend’s life, but it would be strangely formal to add the qualifier of a last name to someone you’ve known since you were six.
I’ve never had a nickname but, like most Jewish people, I do have a Hebrew name. Well, to be more specific, I have a Yiddish name and then a Hebrew middle name. My Yiddish name is Leebah and my Hebrew middle name is Channa. Channa was chosen because my actual middle name is Nicole and Channa, while being the Hebrew version of the name Hannah, has a prominent N sound so it makes sense as a correlative for Nicole. Leebah was chosen for a much more poetic reason. See, Jews have a tradition of only naming children after dead people. It’s bad luck to name your child after an alive person and, I’m guessing, also bad luck not to name your child after anyone, so almost all Jews are named after dead people. I was always told I was named after my great-grandmother Luba, who died before I was born. Luba was a teacher in Lithuania when the Nazi’s invaded. She managed to escape with my 2-year-old grandmother who was being hidden in a gentile family’s farmhouse and who was not her biological daughter. Together, they eventually made it to Montreal with my grandmother’s biological uncle, Papa Pinks, who Luba later married. The three of them lived as a family until Luba and Papa Pinks died.
At some point I learned that my grandmother’s name, Aviva, a feminized version of the word for Spring in Hebrew, was not her birth name. Rather it was given to her by Luba after they escaped war-torn Europe. Her birth name was actually Leebah, if you can believe it. I was told Luba changed her name to Aviva for both practical and symbolic reasons. The practical reason being that she thought it might be confusing or insight ridicule for her and her now daughter to have such similar foreign names in Montreal. The poetic reason is they were starting over in a new country and in a new family unit with a hopeful vision of achieving some version of the Canadian dream, so it made sense to give their adopted child a shiny new vernal name as a symbol of their collective rebirth.
At the time of writing, my grandmother is still alive. In fact, she just got back from an organized trip to Poland with a bunch of teenagers to do Holocaust education. She is alive and my parents knowingly gave me her original name. I think the logic was that they wanted to name me after Luba, but Leeba sounds a little nicer to English speaking ears and since Aviva wasn’t using it anymore, it was fair game. The unsaid part though is that, in line with Jewish tradition, it implies that the child my grandmother was during the Holocaust had experienced a type of death and so they got to honour both this child and her adoptive mother at the same time. If you must, you have my Semitic blessing to mentally insert a joke about Jews loving a two for one deal here. Amen.
I think it would be unfortunate to end this with the obvious assertion that names and naming contribute to forming a sense of identity, even though that is, obviously, what this is all about. Instead, I’ll offer you this: names are a vessel—and if at the mention of a penetrable item you are remembering the first paragraph, yes of course I mean vessel in the LeGuinian “carrier bag theory” sense and OF COURSE that’s how I am connecting this all back to my crooked holes—and the once fluid things being named take on the shape of that vessel. Names give form to the watery unknowable. They are a small piece of the map that allow one to navigate the endless network of life’s crooked canals. They are the textual or sonic boundaries that form garden walls, so things grow from a place of being secured and in connection. That is all to say, there is a certain intimacy implicit in knowing what to call something. In knowing how to hold the being you wish to acknowledge. When we call on things loudly and with conviction, we let anyone in the vicinity in on that intimacy too. We are saying, “I know this thing” causing a vulnerable mutual reveal.