#16 🧊 Making a name for yourself, amongst the Johns, with a fridge 🧽

What’s in a name?

Choosing a name for a child is exciting, but fraught. People seem to find it hard to shake their own connotations of a name. Maybe someone bullied them, and they hate that bully’s name forever. Or maybe their parents gave their dog that name, which makes it a little weird now to give to a kid. There are the people who just want a plain name so as not to attract too much attention; these people might quail at the idea of a rarer, perhaps more bizarre name. Meanwhile, the parents who seek out the most unique name they can find might find the names those other parents prefer hopelessly commonplace. You can’t win, it seems.

And maybe you choose a variant spelling of a name, and this throws all people off for all eternity. We named my son Neko, which is a legitimate variation of the more common Nico or Niko – but yes, rarer. Sorry Neko, I now understand that you will forever be correcting people. Even when I spell it out to people, I sometimes discover that they’ve spelled it the way they consider to be the proper way, like I’ve just plain got it wrong.

Today’s post is about my Dad, and how he and practically everyone else in the fifties (and beyond) was named John. It’s also about naive thoughts of “making a name for yourself”.

🧊 Read: The Johns 🧽

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