Monday, August 9, 2010

story of a name

Overheard: a kolehiyala on a trike complaining about how her parents gave her a 'not-so-good-to-hear' name. In a way that she's sees appropriate, they should have given her a handle other than Maria Capra. Ok, I was kidding.

The chat with her collaborator on the front row of the trike did not divulge what her name was for my decree if it is at all ill-sounding but I heard similar stories; even a colleague once commented she didn't 'like' her name that much. (Personally, I think it's somewhat uncorrupted).

Each name is brought into life with a story. In my brood, it's almost about a combination of other names. Our eldest and youngest are combined names of our parents. My name and ditse's are from our grandparents; mines from my mother side, hers from our paternal old folks. Another sister's an ode to her birth month and a queen. My only brother is a namesake of a prince who only my father knows. (He says by the way that he doesn't like this name too).

This scheme appears to me as a sense of self-esteem, honoring forebears and those people we look up to.

More than what has been put in our records of birth, our entire being is reduced to that jumble of letters. How we walk through our waking days spells out the letters that will identify us; what we do is a character that will soon build up to a word. So how good or rotten a name may sound is not something that was given to us. It is something that we spawn ourselves.

There are many ways to create a 'better-sounding' name, one of them acting better than being snotty. It's still not too late. A friend aptly puts it: a name is all that we can truly have. I hope you got that Maria!

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