In the year I was born, David must have been the most popular given name in the Western world. Most of my male schoolmates were called David, and when we were all drafted at the age of eighteen, we entered an army of Davids. The confusion was so great that I adopted another name for the duration to remember who I was.
Nevertheless, my name has a distinguished place in history. There was the Biblical King David, who defeated the bully Goliath and had eight wives. It’s hard to decide which of these was the more astonishing feat of courage. Then I like to claim a nominal kinship with the French revolutionary painter David, David Livingstone, the explorer, David Foster Wallace, the novelist, David Niven, the actor, and a few more distinguished namesakes.
Of course, we don’t choose our names, and it’s a tough job for parents to make the right decision at a stressful time. A warning example is the father in Lawrence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. He was obsessive on the subject of names and believed that they were the key to a person’s fortune and destiny. He divided up the world of boys’ names into those that were dull and neutral, like Jack, Steve, or David, those that were lucky, like William or Andrew, and those that were absolutely catastrophic, like Tristram. By a comical series of accidents, his own son was named Tristram and spent the rest of his life complaining about it.
This just shows how careful parents ought to be. Young people with solid, harmless names like Tom, Dick or Harry can still be found, but too many parents want to be more creative and burden their unsuspecting babies with the names of ephemeral celebrities, videogame characters, favorite sports teams, or what sometimes seem like random combinations of syllables. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. The poet T.S.Eliot declared that even the naming of cats is a difficult matter, which it is. But cats don’t have to go to school or college, or have a social life, or, most importantly, get a job.
A bizarre name is like a clown’s hat. It’s distracting and makes it hard to take the owner seriously.
In the pop music world, celebrities routinely choose exotic-sounding names for themselves. Elton John, Stevie Wonder, and Lady Gaga have probably had more success than they would have enjoyed under the names they were born with – Dwight, Judkins, and Germanotta. This may be the secret of success – choose a good stage name and the world will follow you. Consider the son of King Philip of Macedon, who, under his alias as Alexander the Great, created the largest empire in history. William the Conqueror, Suleiman the Magnificent, and Richard the Lionheart all got a career boost from their names. Simply adding a title to an ordinary name makes it more impressive - King Charles, Empress Josephine, and so on. We are, all of us, strangely susceptible to names.
This is not just ancient history. Names can and do still influence the vote in modern elections, because a name is often all we know about the candidates. If you are fortunate, you may already have the ideal name. The combination of a popular cartoon character with a winning playing card is almost unbeatable. Who would vote for a candidate called Tristram?
