This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
What is a name?
When our daughter was born, we had already settled on her first name. It was the name of my wife’s great-grandmother on her mother’s side, and she’d been pretty enthusiastic about that name long before we even started trying to have kids.
And even though my wife kept her surname after we got married, we agreed that our kids would take my last name. So we knew well before she was born what our daughter’s first and last name would be.
But it wasn’t until we were holding our baby on the first day of her life that we decided on a middle name.
Inspired by the ancestral theme, we settled on one that would invoke both me and my mother, who always wanted a daughter, but wasn’t able to have one.
When I told my mom what our daughter’s middle name would be, she was deeply touched, and said, “That was also my mom’s middle name.”
I had either never known that, or completely forgotten. It was one of those moments that suggest there are more connections than we can see.
For a while now, I’ve been thinking of names as addresses.
Traditionally, in Western society, you have a surname and a given name. The surname attaches you to your family in some way, and any given names orient you within that family. Your whole name locates you within your broader community.
This is a reasonably easy idea to grasp when it comes to Western naming conventions, but I think it’s true of all names, for everyone, even if they attempt a radical break from their family of origin.
Someone who legally or even informally changes their name is only attempting to change their address, in order to better articulate the connections they value.
No matter what, though, a name, as an address, is nothing more or less than a social coordinate, and is only as strong as the connections it describes.
In that sense, we truly are the sum of our relationships.
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