In the year I was born David must have been the most popular given name in Britain, and possibly in the western world. As a result most of my male schoolmates were called David, and when we are all drafted at the age of eighteen we entered an army of Davids. For a couple of years I had to use another name so I could remember who I was.
Nevertheless it was a distinguished name in history. There was the Biblical King David of course who defeated Goliath and had eight wives. It's hard to decide which was the most 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 ultra-distinguished namesakes. On the other hand I'm rather embarrassed by the murderer David Berkowitz and the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron.
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. I'm reminded of the father in Lawrence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, an autodidact and amateur philosopher who 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 boy's 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 goes to show how careful parents ought to be. But an awful lot of them fail in this duty, and give their children ludicrous and inappropriate names that, like Tristram, can only be a lifelong handicap. This is mostly a problem that affects young people, because their parents grew up in an age of liberation when all the old rules were abandoned.
Young people with solid 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, cartoon characters on TV, 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 important, get a job. A bizarre name is like a clown's hat. It's distracting, and makes it hard to take the owner seriously.
Take any random selection of great Americans and you will find a parade of the classic Anglo-Saxon names: John, Martin, Susan, William, Andrew, George, Alice, Eleanor, and even the occasional David. The Presidential hopefuls for 2016 show much the same pattern: John, Jan, Jim, Hilary - not an exotic name among them except Rand Paul whose name manages to evoke both Ayn Rand and Paul of Tarsus at the same time.
On the other hand some people, like the current President, have been able to rise above their unusual names, so perhaps things are changing. We may even have a candidate called Tristram one of these days. How could anyone fail to vote for a President called Tristram?
Copyright: David Bouchier
