Subject: Re: Hmmm...
Author:
Posted on: 2011-05-10 04:09:00 UTC
Names can effect you growing up. I have a name that was different enough in the small minded town I grew up in set me apart. I can't say the all the bullying I got as a kid resulted from that, but in my experience once small kids pick a person to pick on that person tends to remain the one picked on, and it doesn't take something huge to set up the initial bullying volleys. Bullying does effect a person's personality.
That said, whether the person named Zachary is actually that much different than the person named Earl, I don't know. However, what other people expect from those names are different. What people expect are formed from many sources. As a personal example (and no offense to anyone out there with this name who is a nice person), I have never known a man who goes by the name Lee that is a decent human being. Neither has my husband. Many other people that I know have said the same thing. These were all different actual names, Lee, Leon, first name, middle name, whatever the person was widely known by the name Lee. They were all terrible. I would never name my kid Lee, if I thought people were going to use that name for his day to day interactions.
Now, I have known several people who had Lee somewhere in their name that went by a different name. My husband for one has a middle name of Lee. He goes by his first name or one of a couple of nicknames based on his first name. I'm obviously of the opinion that he is a pretty great guy. This was actually an issue while I was pregnant with my third son, as people on both sides of the family swore they would never call him by the first name we had picked out, and we'd planning on using Lee as a middle name. We picked a middle name neither of us minded hearing. The families called him that name for about two months, and then decided he's just not a ______, he's a (name we all swore to hate). Go figure.
Like I said that is just a personal thing for me, but if a man introduced himself to me with "Call me Lee." My reactions to him would not be the same as if he had introduced himself as Zachary or Earl, so while the actual person's personality may not be effected--the reactions of other people might be. I know I have read articles in a couple of magazines to this effect, but I cannot find them now.
One last thing. I spent considerable more than five minutes picking out the names of my kids. For characters it goes different ways. Some characters I purely make something up, although this usually ends with me finding out later that what I thought was nonsense is in fact a real word or name. Others I go the random name generator route. Some I think about a lot. For one of my agents I traded my kids something for the use of a name they had made up.