What's In A Name

It's always a little awkward for me when people ask me about my name. The name itself sounds nice enough on the surface. It's the follow up questions that are the problem.

"Are you named after anyone?"

Well. Sort of. I'm named after Marie Antoinette. It's really clever. My first middle name is Antoinette and my first name rhymes with Marie. Nothing says "I hope to marry you off at a young age so that you can live among strangers who will relentlessly abuse you for being a foreigner who doesn't speak their language until they finally cut your head off" like naming your child after Marie Antoinette. My second middle name means "born again".

And let's just pretend for a moment that I'm wrong about this connection. It's worth noting that my brothers all have strong German names that directly tie into our paternal family tree. And my name is French.

"What does it mean?"

Well, it's a French word that's an endearment but it's in the masculine form. My second middle name is also in the masculine form. It's kind of a funny thing. I took a year of French in high school and one of the few things I remember is what my teacher called the ne pas sandwich. You take a word, like run, and you want to say don't run, so you put ne in front of it and pas after it. Ne (French word for run) pas. And now it's don't run. There's just something about my name being masculine, feminine, masculine that reminds me of that ne pas sandwich. Antoinette means "beyond praise" unless I'm right about that ne pas thing and it's meant to mean unworthy of praise.

Maybe you think that nobody thinks things through like this, but if I can think it up, where did I learn to think this way?

Anyway, it's just an awkward little moment. Usually I say that I'm not named after anyone in my family tree and my name is a French endearment. All the other stuff is just too heavy for small talk.

The name of this blog is much more straightforward for anyone who has seen me in real life recently:

I had some weird ideas about when and how I would start telling more people about my blog. But part of my fight against perfectionism is letting go of those kinds of ideas. So here I go....