What's in a name?

It’s a terrible thing to be a painfully shy child and have a name like ‘Noldy’. People say ‘What?’, or if they’re polite, ‘I beg your pardon?’, and then you have to speak to them twice. Whereas, if my name had been Elizabeth, or Jane, I could have said it once, got it over with, and been forgotten, able to blend into the background, which is where I felt comfortable.

Of course, the full horror of the entire name is even worse. It’s Arnoldina. ‘Did your parents want a boy?’. ‘Was your father’s name Arnold?’ No, and no. I was named after my Dutch grandmother, who was delighted, poor thing. My children know full well they never have to name anything after me.

Why couldn’t my parents have honoured my Austrian grandmother?– she was Antonia.

My maiden name was Haidlinger. Make no mistake, I liked being a Haidlinger, and still consider myself one. But ponder the effect of this immoderate nomenclature when I went to school.

Every day, in the first year, we had to write our names down. And there I was, laboriously printing A-r-n-o-l-d-i-n-a H-a-i-d-l-i-n-g-e-r, when everyone else had already moved on to the next lesson.

Parents, consider your children. Consider their futures. I’m not just thinking of the obvious ‘Miles Long’, or ‘North West’ (Kanye West’s daughter), or even the really peculiar ‘Harper Seven’, the youngest Beckham child, name chosen by her siblings. Celebrities don’t count. Their IQ seems to diminish in direct proportion to increase of income and exposure.

But I know a perfectly normal family who called their little girl ‘Bilbo’.

Yes, there was a time when it was fashionable to name your children after characters in the “Lord of the Rings’. And this was long before the films appeared, so at least we know the parents were readers. I know a man called ‘Strider’. Well, okay, I could probably survive, were I a man, going through life being called Strider.

But Bilbo is a Hobbit. A brave and good Hobbit, to be sure, but a male Hobbit.

Aikona, parents, be good to your children when naming them.