geeky
sasunarufan02 asks, "How do the fae go about naming their pure-blood kids/changeling kids?"Fae naming! Hooray! One of my favorite "oh sweet Great Pumpkin she's talking about it again make her stop topics!"
Let's face it: when the majority of your population can reasonably expect to live for centuries, if not forever, names like "John" and "Mary" stop working for you real, real fast. There's not enough turn-over, and nicknames only go so far. Also, you're going to have an influx of changelings whose mortal parents insisted on "John" and "Mary," which puts even more pressure on the long-lived to avoid common names. Plus, nothing will ever really go out of fashion, since names don't "age out" when the people who have them insist on continuing to walk around and do stuff, rather than politely dying and allowing trendy new names to come into fashion. So what do you get?
You get theme naming.
In Faerie, it's considered insulting to name someone directly after someone else, as it implies either that you're hoping to replace them, or that you expect them to die soon. You can, however, give names to honor or acknowledge specific people. So October, for example, is named partially to honor September Torquill, who was a close friend of Amandine's. October comes after September. September herself was named to honor her father, Septimus, as were her two brothers, Simon and Sylvester. It's a very "S"-y family. (Yes, there are reasons that October was named after a Torquill, no, I won't go into them yet, no, Sylvester is not her father.)
Another example of same-letter naming is the Lorden family, where Patrick and Dianda named their sons Peter and Dean. Both of these are relatively common names, but the Undersea is distinct enough from the land that they have a wider range of names they haven't used yet. The mermaids could give a shit if there's already a Cu Sidhe named "Bob."
Back to October: her name is part of a chain of month names that honor by meaning, not by sound. So September named her own daughter "January," in part to honor the baby's Tylwyth Teg father (since they're often associated with ice and the winter in this setting), and in part after herself, at the urging of her husband. When January had a daughter of her own, she named her "April," both in honor of her mother, and as an acknowledgment to the Chinese holiday of Qingming, to honor her wife. (As a Dryad, April didn't really have a name. So naming her was appropriate and necessary.)
As for Toby's daughter, Gillian...I have had exactly one person email to ask if I was aware that "Gillian" is a form of "Julius." Yes. Yes, I was. While Toby didn't want to outright name her daughter "July," or even "Julia," the fae tendency toward referential naming is very strong, and so she found a name that could be traced back to "July" without actually being "July." Because old habits are hard to break.
Fae families will literally have children named "Antigone" growing up next to children named "Tom," and maybe children named "Duvet," because they like the sound of those names, and they fit into some obscure set of familial naming chains. Oh, and a lot of fae change their names as they age, either to achieve a fresh start, or for social reasons (Princes of Cats change their names when they become Kings, for example). This can trigger a whole new set of referential names.
And now you know.
August 21 2012, 21:10:05 UTC 4 years ago
And now I really want to know why it is significant that Toby is named after a Torquill, aside from the fact that I frankly wish Sylvester would adopt *me.* Except for, y'know, the ax-crazy daughter, and the occasionally unbalanced wife with racial identity issues, and the homicidal identical twin and...
Duvet made me nearly spit tea all over the screen, because let us face it, Duvet isn't that far of a stretch from Cody and Cody has been trendy on and off...
August 21 2012, 21:23:35 UTC 4 years ago
^^^And this nearly made me spit tea! :)
These days when you try to give a human child an "interesting-but-not-so-weird-as-to-have-t
August 21 2012, 21:52:27 UTC 4 years ago Edited: August 21 2012, 21:55:06 UTC
(my other cat's name is Beau. I did not name him. He would have had a MUCH more epic name if I had named him.)
August 21 2012, 21:59:20 UTC 4 years ago
We got a kitten in 2001 and named him Loki.
How aptly named he is. He had to go live with friends in 2007, who then got a "friend" for him - a kitten that they named Thor.
When I was a kid my parents would name our cats by opening a page in the dictionary and pointing to a word - this got us Duchess and Gyro. (As an adult these names seem strangely normal for the results of random chance.) They did this because I had a puppy when I was three and couldn't decide on a name. My dad kept suggesting name after name, and in frustration blurted out "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!" Thus, we had a Shadrach. :)
August 22 2012, 01:45:32 UTC 4 years ago
August 22 2012, 02:11:26 UTC 4 years ago Edited: August 22 2012, 02:15:51 UTC
This worked out about as well as you'd expect.
Of course how I explain Tali's name differs. People who are apt to give me a hard time about my geekery (who in general can bite me, but when they're family, telling them to bite me doesn't tend to work) get told that Tali means "dew" in Hebrew and, of course, Tali the cat is a soft silver grey.
That's not WHY she's named Tali but it's plausible!
August 22 2012, 06:51:16 UTC 4 years ago
A few years later, the person who adopted Vir's littermate Kimba had her life hit the wall & asked us to adopt him. Since Kimba is bigger, darker, & bolder than Vir, we very briefly considered renaming him Londo. Then we recalled just how well Vir lives up to his name & sanity --not to mention self-preservation -- prevailed.
August 22 2012, 22:31:46 UTC 4 years ago
Beau would have made a good Vir. He even has a small ruff.
August 22 2012, 23:46:39 UTC 4 years ago
All of my kitties are named for B5 characters. Delenn here was the first. She had to be Delenn, she was a beautiful GRAY! Delenn was a beautiful regal kitty. The next kitten was Ivanova, because when we got her she was a kitten to Delenn's adult cat, and had no qualms about charging Delenn to establish her space. Marcus was 3rd, and was a goofball. After we had to put Delenn to sleep, we got 2 kittens from the humane society. The boy was named Garibaldi, and the girl Na'Toth.
We might be willing to name a cat Londo, but we would never name one Morden or Talia.
August 23 2012, 14:28:57 UTC 4 years ago
August 23 2012, 23:32:10 UTC 4 years ago
August 21 2012, 22:08:05 UTC 4 years ago
I drew the line, however, at letting him name our firstborn "Rachel Carson Seawater". As it was, Elder Daughter's first name turned out to be one of the most popular. You just never know...
August 22 2012, 16:02:53 UTC 4 years ago