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I was surfing the Net in a common area when I overheard a male friend on the telephone saying, "Awwww. She had the baby?" Then a few seconds later he exclaimed, "What did you say? You named your baby Sniper!"
I couldn't help it. I started laughing hysterically. When he got off the phone he told me that he'd misheard his friend. That the friend hadn't named his new daughter Sniper but Cypher. "Still," he said, "People need to stop scarring their kids for life with these crazy names."
Names came up again later when one friend said her mother used to call her "devil" when she was naughty. Her given name is Angel.
"Me too," said our mutual friend, another male. My middle name is Angelo and my mother would call me "Diablo" all the time.
I said, "You must've really been bad." He nodded, telling me that he got into a bit of trouble as a boy.
In that crowd I didn't tell them the source of my first name and the joke that now goes with it. My mother named me after my father by combining the first three letters and last letter of his name with the feminine French ending "ette." The result was my first name, Nordette. Later she learned she hadn't been as creative as she thought. Nordette is an old French name, but worse was that a French company had recently named a new product using logic similar to hers. The company had a product made with a synthetic progesterone called Levonorgesterel. That company also wanted to give its produc a feminine French name and it too chose Nordette. The product was birth control pill.
I won't get into how I found out I shared my name, a name that people usually noted for its uniqueness, with a birth control pill. Let's just say I'd heard rumors and one day found myself in a doctor's exam room surrounded by "my name" on calendars, pens, posters, and stirrup covers.
So, no, I do not have one of the so-called African-American ethnic names that came into vogue in the 70s and attributed to the influence of African-American self-esteem movements like the Black Power movement. My mother was influenced more by my father's name and New Orleans French culture. Nevertheless, perhaps due to my still relatively rare name and its origin, I think about the power of names from time to time. I'm also a fiction writer who chooses names for characters. Consequently, I sometimes study name meanings and reflect on whether our names influence our destinies.
I've been curious about the phenomena of African-American job applicants with culturally-inspired names being discriminated against in the job market. You may have heard of that study in which two identical resumes are submitted; however one has a name associated with African-American culture, a black name like LaKisha, while the other resume uses a "white" name, meaning a traditional English name like Emily. The job candidate with the "white name" is more likely to be called in for interview, according to the study.
In the book Freakonomics, which was re-released as expanded and updated in October 2006 after its earlier publishing success , economist and co-author Steven D. Levitt cautions readers to not automatically deduce cause from correlation. It seems that in the case of ethnic names, some people have concluded that an ethnic name causes a child to be unsuccessful in life. Levitt says otherwise as discussed in this 2005 Slate.com article:
The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name—whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn't the fault of his or her name. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don't tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that's why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more
