Friday, October 16, 2015

Why on earth did we name her Terah?

Naming children.  Sometimes it would be nice if we did what some cultures do and name our children after their birth order.  Kali would have been named "First", Nora "Second" and so on.

But no.  In our culture names have to be more complicated.  Mostly we name our kids with words that mean little to us in our everyday lives other than being somebody's name.  It is the unusual family that names their babies after seasons, months, other species, etc.  Just once I would like to hear of a kid named "Feldspar", or maybe "Equinox."

As in many other areas of our lives, we tend to ride the borders between the quixotic and the maudlin, the soulful and the ordinary.  We don't want to saddle our children (who do have to grow up in this culture, after all) with names that they have to explain all the time or which pin them to a clear and present definition, but neither are we satisfied with just picking a name we like from the standard menu even though our tastes can hardly be said to be sophisticated.  And we have to like, or at least be o.k. with, all the meanings of the names we choose.  They have to work together well phonetically and conceptually.

In our case there was another wrinkle, in that we already had a theme going on.  Kali's name is associated with energy and fire, Nora's name is associated with light, but her middle name, "Lynne" has water connotations.  Alida might translate from Spanish as "winged."  To our minds, these names tie in to three of the "four elements" of ancient concept: Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.  We were just missing an Earth connotation in our complete set.  Collect them all, I say!

The above parameters narrowed things down pretty quickly, as you can imagine.  Which suits us fine since we also don't have much tolerance for the naming process to drag on and on.  I think there is a risk that if you agonize too long and hard and aren't willing to go with your instincts housed in a fun and simple process that you may lock yourself into the habit of agonizing and continue to agonize after the fact about whether you made a good choice.  Bleh.  No thanks.

Anyway, congratulations to my brother E and his girlfriend K for having pegged us pretty closely after hearing about the thematic component.  As early as July, K told us they both were placing their bets on the word "Terra", as in Terra Firma, Terra Cotta, etc.  Already by then we were homing in on "Terah" (which is just an alternative spelling of "Terra") as our first choice for first name.  I gulped and demurred with some sort of non-response like, "Huh.  We'll just have to see."  The kind of thing you say to your kid when they have guessed their birthday present that was supposed to be a surprise.

In the end it is bad form to ignore the obvious choice just because it is the obvious choice.  And it's o.k. to be predictable to those closest to you.  Besides, the longer we sat with it the very much more we liked it, especially me.  I was not bowled over at first, but over time I came to love the way it felt like a sweet name, but one she could grow with and into with a wide variety of personalities.  It didn't feel cutesy or embellished, and was not at all common but quite pronounceable and composed of familiar components.  A good, solid name.

Not that we didn't look around.  I spent a fair bit of effort on poking around on the Internet trying to find any word in any language (English included) that I could associate with the Earth element.  I tried trees and wood, hill and valley, land and soil, field and forest, dust and stone...I even tried looking up the words for "turtle" and "tortoise."  No luck.  There may be the 'perfect' word out there somewhere that we missed, but frankly I am so attached now to the name we've chosen that if there is one I am not worried about having regrets.

Our biggest concern was that it would not be an endearing name for the baby stage, but we have, after 4 days of living with an adorable Terah in the house, fully dispensed with that one.

It also mattered to us that we be able to find a middle name or names that were a nice fit.  Since the first name was pretty conceptual, it seemed perilous to choose the next one.  How to select a middle name that would be meaningful while not pigeonholing or going over the top?  We started with names we just plain liked, or which sounded nice with Terah.  I don't remember the rest we looked into, but Janelle has in recent years really liked the name Cybil, though she thinks she always thought of it as being spelled with an S.  I think we had a kids' book growing up that had a horse named Cybil with a C, so I've always assumed the C thing.  There is always the risk that someone will think it is pronounced "Kigh-Bull", but you have to take some risks...what were we going to do, spell it "S-I-B-B-L-E?"

Where were we?  Oh...middle names.  So we looked up Cybil, and it turns out that it means "soothsayer," or "prophet."  Sometimes these words imply some kind of special vision or prophetic gift but "sooth" is also simply an old synonym of "truth", and the notion of the prophetic can imply simply bearing witness to the truth.  So if Terah Cybil means "Earth Prophet" that could be some spooky person who has access to insider information regarding the earth (and has the duty to reveal it to someone), or it could be someone who is a bearer of truth with regard to the earth.  The first of those sounds like too much pressure to us.  The second we like really pretty well.  Especially we like it because of one particular fact that we expect to be true of her:  if things keep going like they are, the mineral portion of this kid will be mostly extracted from the soil of this place we call home.  She will, in her body and through no special effort of her own, be a bearer of truth with regard to the possibilities for a life made on, and of, this land.

Two snags left.  First, Janelle didn't like the plodding sound of three two-syllable names stitched into a string.  Terah Cybil Myers didn't cut it for her.  Second, we had not yet tied her name in with family naming history, which is another thing we like to do.  Another name that has always appealed to Janelle is Elizabeth.  Far more common, of course, than the others...it was easy to find examples of the name being used in our families: Janelle's aunt and my cousin, specifically.  Also a longtime family friend of the Myers family (who happens to be the person who married us) is so named.  So, justifications in hand, we settled on Terah Cybil Elizabeth Myers.  I don't love the repeated syllable sound at the end of Cybil and the beginning of Elizabeth, and it's plenty long, but you can't have everything and, hey, it works!  We have come to love it beyond reason, because it is associated now with precious her, who we also love beyond reason.

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