I despise my given name, so I use a variant of my surname as a personal name: Mickey Michaelson would be parallel. I don’t ask my family to eschew the personal name, but most of them do because they know I never liked it, even as a kid. The exceptions are my father and my more stubborn siblings.
My wife, oddly, still addresses me by surname only, which people find odd. My baby sister calls me Big Brother, and my little sister calls me Boy. I’ve so rarely heard any of them use either my given name that I suspect they’d all have to think for half a second to remember it.
Uhh. What does this mean exactly? How do we know that there were gender based names 20,000 years ago, if no one wrote about it?
I don’t believe this is true. I clearly said “Back in hunter-gatherer times…”
In recent times, mainly with the advent of private property, women’s value has drastically decreased. The ability to horde wealth has allowed society to take wealth away from women. 500 years ago, a man’s value was a combination of several things, but mainly the property that he owned. Women didn’t own property, and as such their value was restricted to their abilities to raise children. A man’s value was easily tens to hundreds of times greater than that of a comparable woman. This situation has only recently been fixed (and mainly only in the developed world).
20,000 years ago in hunter-gatherer societies, however, women’s value was near equal to men’s. There was no “capital” that men could horde. Value was mainly in the work that you were able to do. Men hunted, women gathered. Men brought meat, women brought nuts and berries. Anthropologists suggest that women were NOT chattel, and were highly valued members of society. They had skills and talents that were viewed with similar value as the skills and talents that were provided by men.
The first day of college, one of my prof’s decided to call me Joe Hometown. It caught on (generally as just Hometown) such that people couldn’t find me in the student directory as very few people knew my actual (Germanic, somewhat hard to pronounce) actual family name.
Ah, but this comes from a time when SOME people were literate. Which means that at this time there was probably already a lot of travel and gossip and the sorts of things that might have given rise to gendered names.
My wonder is whether or not there were gendered names before that time… 50,000 years ago, for example. The only reason proposed thus far that I can believe, is that when a child is born, all we really know about them is their sex, and so coming up with a sex-based name might naturally follow (since we don’t know anything else about them).
(Though I suppose this theory would lead to naming based on appearance, which isn’t too frequent now. Bignose. Brownhair. Fourfingers. Hrmmm…)
A line of longitude is a meridian is a north-south line. But mac_bolan didn’t specify which meridian, and in any case I think his statement is much too simplistic. Plenty of cultures haven’t traditionally used the “Given name Family name” or “Family name Given name” convention, for example.
Of course, not all cultures name their children at birth. There’s very little need to name a child before it’s to walking and talking age if you live in a society without databases and tax forms.
And high infant mortality. Wait until they are worthy of a name that suits their personality. You’re not Dances With Wolves until you’re old enough to do so!
