Friday, September 4, 2009

What if I had been named Jacqueline

Do you like your name?

I have never liked my name very much.

I have always been called Jeanie, but my name is really Dorothy Jean. Dorothy was sort of an old fashioned name when I was a child, and unlike names like Claire and Grace and Madeline it has never come back in to fashion.

A post I read recently, which you can see here, http://noexcuses318.blogspot.com/ , about the "What ifs" in life took me all the way back to "what if" I had been given a different name. I was supposed to have been named Sally, but I was born on a relative's birthday and the plan changed. The only people who ever called me Dorothy Jean were my father (it was his relative) and my brother when he wanted to make me mad.

Would my life have been any different if that relative had been named Amanda or Sarah, or if she had been Edith or Myrtle? Would I have seen myself differently if she had been Alice or Edna? There is a whole field of research built around names....their origins, their meanings, what's currently popular and what's not, but none of it tells me if I would be a different person if I had been named Jacqueline.

How do you relate to people based on their names? Do you relate differently to a Tiffany than to a Velma. Do you like your name?

I have always been and will always be Dorothy Jean, and I will always say my name is Jeanie, unless I'm voting or getting on an airplane, but I will always wonder "what if".

3 comments:

  1. Jeanie, thanks for the referral to my blog!

    I love to think about alternate names. I was named after the best friend of my mom, and I figured she was very special, so it made me feel special. My middle name was my grandmother's maiden name, Pitt. I took a lot of teasing growing up, until Brad came along!

    Great post and, by the way, my mom's name was Jeanne.

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  2. I read that post on "What if´s" as well, and thought it was really good.
    I never liked my name either, but since I have only one, I never had the choice to change it. That´s another thing I wonder about my parents, I´m the only one with one first name, my 3 siblings all have a second name.
    Since getting into blogging I´m amazed at how many Betty´s I´ve found. It´s not as uncommon as I thought.

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  3. When I was a kid I went through phases when I insisted everyone call me but different names becasue I thought mine sounded "old". My Mom, bless her heart, was the only that ever played along with the names I'd come up with. Now, I don't mind my name so much.

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