I never cared for the name Edna, and I still carry the unreasonableness of a child who appraises a person by the name assigned to them against their consent or knowledge at birth. Why, for example, couldn’t her parents (she was a lady in our church) have called her Effloresce which means to blossom, to flourish, which is not unlike rejuvenation, which is the lovely meaning of unlovely Edna (she was the first woman I ever saw play a guitar and she had the blackest hair).
Memoir in ‘E’
But if you know the meaning of Edna doesn’t that make it more attractive?
I thought it might help. It helps a little. Sometimes there is such a huge space between meaning and sound, it confounds me.
For me names are always coloured by the people I meet who have those names. I used to think Edna was an old-fashioned, not particularly attractive name. But then last year I taught an Edna – and she was a lovely person so for me that’s now my perception of Ednas.
That’s true. I didn’t know Edna at all, not really. I was six or seven and she was so tall and far away. And I have yet to meet another Edna, maybe I should find and befriend one! 🙂
(I should say too, in case I seem too awful, that I didn’t like my own name either. It’s quite a rare name in Ireland, at least when I was young, so I was oddly embarrassed by it, and it also seemed old-fashioned but I guess I grew into it. It helped somewhat that I was born an old soul…)
Yes. I’ve grown to live with Huw but it’s not the name I would have chosen for myself. Other children always found other things to rhyme it with!
I once had a friend who got so tired of hearing me rave about my boyfriend (who had a very non-euphonious name which nothing will cause me to reveal) that he started calling the friend “Doobie-wah,” imitating the scat-like syllables of bee-bop singers (of course, he never did this in the boyfriend’s hearing, but sometimes I found myself with a silly grin on my face in the presence of the boyfriend, who always wondered what I was smirking at. I think I was basically out of sympathy with him anyway, at least that’s how it turned out!).
I wonder how it would have turned out if he’d had a different name… Do you think it would have been different? That would be so interesting…
Also… euphonious! That’s a wonderful word.