You’d Better Come Quietly – Three Sketches, Some Outlines And Additional Notes

The most frightening name I have heard is Edmund Blunden, and the most friendly, Laura Benét. For a clumsy name, I give a choice among Negley Farson, Avery Brundage, Aldous Huxley, and Westbrook Pegler. The most musical name I know is Cyril Martindale, and the most imaginative, Helen Twelvetrees. Also, here is one of my favorite sentences: “Helen Twelvetrees drives an Oldsmobile and lives in Wellesley Hills.”

Winnie the Pooh’s Milne deserves an award for being the most beautiful monosyllable. And in the English cinema there is an actress with a name like a curious jewel: Nova Pillbeam. This readily suggests Eva Lightwafer, Ada Moontablet, Ida Sunlozenge, delightful double-exposures in the imagination.

I think it is a pity to have wasted such excellent names on articles of food. Forget your mental associations in taste and in smell for the moment, and see what graceful girls these would be: Mayonnaise, Oleomargarine, Angostura Bitters. Diphtheria, a very pretty name with a little curtsey in the middle of it, should have been attached to a damsel, not a disease.

In a choice of good names, three things should be considered: sound, number of syllables, and accent. Accent is very important. Rossetti’s “five handmaidens whose names are five sweet symphonies, Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, Margaret, and Rosalys” are placed so sensitively in point of accent that if the order of one of them is changed, the symphonic effect is destroyed.

Sing-song in names, especially when both first and last names are dissylables, can be avoided by counterpoint, Fanny Burney, Leonard Feeney, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Eugene O’Neill, are sing-song. But Aubrey De Vere and Louise Guiney are not, by reason of the counterpoint.

When naming a child at a christening, or a character in a novel, a good general rule is to have an unequal number of syllables in the family and Christian names. This is especially true in the case where one of the names has to be a monosyllable. James Joyce, John Keats, Sol Blum, are not good names. When a monosyllable occurs in either name it should be buttressed with a polysyllable in the other: Alexander Pope, Christopher Wren, Nathalia Crane, Rose Macaulay, John Galsworthy, Jacques Maritain. This combination of one-three or three-one is almost invariably successful. If a monosyllable must be in first and last names, then a polysyllablic middle name is required to relieve the staccato: George Bernard Shaw, John Bannister Tabb, James Montgomery Flagg. Never George Shaw, John Tabb, James Flagg.

Beauty of vowel sounds can never be successful in a name if accent is neglected. For all its music, it is impossible to take a name like Amelita Galli-Curci seriously. And Edna St. Vincent Millay (who is the first half of a dactyllic hexameter) was lucky she escaped being Edna St. Vincent McGonigle. Rising accents make a name distinctive. How majestical: Rabindranath Tagore! And a flourishful name can be kept dignified if a change of pace occurs in the accents. For instance, this: Sister Marcela de Carpio de San Felis (sixteenth century poet and mystic).

Where three names are used, let them be of one, two and three syllables in any order: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, May Lamberton Becker, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In view of the fact that Americans, unlike the Italians, are not precise with their consonants, avoid clashes in these or you will become Kathlee Norris, Bernar De Voto or Jame Stephens.