The Profound Consequence of Names

How the Word We Are Given May Help Shape the Person We Become

We come into this world with a given name foisted upon us, sometimes painstakingly considered, other times seemingly chosen out of the immediate necessity to fill in a form.

Some names hold deep meaning for the caregiver, telling a story of family history, ancestry, myths or legends. Others seem like a fun whimsical afterthought, borrowed from a celebrity, a character in a book, or simply something the parents liked the sound of at the time.

What perhaps isn’t considered is just how much that decision might shape the person who has to carry it.

Not through any mystical property of the name itself, nor because its etymological meaning somehow manifests itself in the child, but because names have baggage.

Pluck almost any name from the air and associations come with it. Thousands of years of culture, class, religion, migration and tradition have accumulated around names, while celebrity, fashion and popular culture can transform those associations within a generation.

Say Rupert and Tabitha and, before you’ve been given a single biographical detail, your mind has probably already furnished the house.

Rupert and Tabitha are galloping across the grounds of an inherited estate. Billy and Brandi, meanwhile, are preparing the tractor to sow corn somewhere in the rural Midwest.

These people aren’t real. Yet somehow they already have accents, incomes, educations, clothes and opinions.

Of course these are caricatures. There will be Ruperts living in trailer parks and Brandis with inherited estates. But the fact that the caricatures appear at all reveals something peculiar about names. They contain social information, or at least what we believe to be social information.

Certain names coalesce around particular generations, classes, regions, ethnicities and social groups. This isn’t entirely imagined. Names aren’t distributed randomly through a population. Parents themselves belong to cultures and generations, and their choice of name inevitably reflects some of that environment.

This makes cause and effect difficult to separate. A Rupert raised among enormous privilege may possess characteristics associated with privilege because of the world in which he was raised, not because somebody called him Rupert.

But that doesn’t make the name irrelevant, because everyone else can hear it too.

Before somebody knows your character, they may know your name. And with that name comes whatever collection of assumptions their own culture and experience has attached to it.

A teacher encounters it on a register. An employer sees it at the top of a CV. Another child hears it across a playground. Someone is introduced to you at a party.

Each may form some tiny expectation before you’ve had the opportunity to demonstrate anything about yourself at all.

Perhaps you sound serious. Posh. Friendly. Old-fashioned. Intelligent. Foreign. Working-class. Attractive. Eccentric. Trustworthy. Soft. Tough.

None of those judgements needs to be accurate to have consequences.

If people expect slightly different things from us, they may behave slightly differently towards us. This changes how we experience our social world.

A teacher’s expectation. A playground joke. An affectionate abbreviation. Who approaches you and who doesn’t.

A single encounter can be trivial. Accumulated across a lifetime, they begin to add up.

Personality, after all, doesn’t develop in isolation. We construct an understanding of ourselves partly through the reactions of other people. We learn which behaviours are rewarded, which are mocked, what seems expected of us and what sort of person others apparently believe us to be.

The name therefore becomes part of a feedback loop.

Not name, then personality.

Name, expectation, interaction, experience, self-perception, behaviour, and back around again.

There is another participant in this process who is easy to overlook: ourselves. Eventually we discover our own name.

Not merely that a particular collection of sounds causes us to turn our head, but that the word itself has associations. We meet other people who share it. We hear jokes about it. We discover whether it is common or unusual, fashionable or dated. We hear how it sounds spoken by friends, parents, lovers and strangers.

At some point, we form an opinion about the thing that supposedly represents us.

This becomes particularly obvious with nicknames.

A nickname is often not chosen by the person at all, but emerges spontaneously from the people around them. It can feel strangely intimate for precisely that reason. It isn’t simply what your parents decided to call you before they knew you. It is what other people began calling you after they did. 

Perhaps this makes a nickname, when it emerges naturally, a closer reflection of the character itself. The given name is chosen in anticipation of a person who doesn’t yet exist. The nickname is bestowed in response to the person who emerges.

And different names can seem to contain different versions of the same person.

The full name used professionally. The shortened version used by friends. The ridiculous childhood name still used by family. A surname used by old schoolmates. An initial that somehow stuck.

The person hasn’t changed, but the relationship has.

Most of us instinctively understand this. Being addressed by a name normally reserved for childhood can momentarily return us to that social role. Hearing the formal version from someone who normally uses a nickname can signal seriousness before another word has been spoken.

Names don’t merely identify people. They identify relationships between people.

Perhaps this is also why deliberately changing a name can feel so significant.

Writers adopt pseudonyms. Actors take stage names. People abandon childhood nicknames. Marriage has traditionally changed surnames. Immigrants sometimes adapt names to another language or culture. Others simply reach adulthood and decide that the name they were given no longer suits them.

A new name doesn’t magically manufacture a new personality. But it can provide a different social context in which to express one.

There is something almost backwards about all of this.

We tend to think of a name as a label attached to a person. First there is the individual, complete with all their peculiarities, and then there is the word we use to identify them.

But that isn’t how life actually happens.

For almost everyone we meet, the name arrives remarkably early. Often before the person themselves does. It is written on cards and forms, stitched onto blankets, entered into databases and spoken among relatives while the person it supposedly describes has barely developed a character at all.

The label precedes the thing it will eventually come to represent.

From then on, person and name develop together.

None of this means we are prisoners of our names. Any effect is tangled among the innumerable influences of family, temperament, culture, opportunity and chance. A name cannot determine whether somebody becomes kind or cruel, confident or timid, successful or otherwise.

But determinism isn’t required for a name to matter.

A tiny bias repeated across a lifetime is no longer tiny. And if our personalities develop partly in response to the social environments we inhabit, anything capable of subtly altering that environment becomes part of the story.

Perhaps, then, the peculiar power of a name isn’t that we grow into its meaning. It is that we spend a lifetime growing in response to what other people think it means.

Your name was probably chosen before anyone knew who you were.

By the time they did, it had already become part of who you were becoming.