The Naming of Names

First published in Phlogiston Three, November 1984.

Names are very important—they have to be right. For example, think about the tale of Beren and Luthien. It was Tolkien’s favourite tale—it was poetry and romance, possibly even Romance. It was a tale told in High Heroic. Think about it for a time, and then consider the same story told about Kevin and Jennifer. (The tale was a poem, and to be fair, we must keep the rhythms of the names. Let’s make that our New Year resolution—keep the internal rhythms.)

Well? How about the greatest romance of Middle Earth? It just doesn’t work with Kevin and Jennifer. The names don’t fit; they are too mundane.

And then there was King Arthur. With his magic sword Excalibur, he ruled a mighty kingdom. Now there is a tale to stir the heart. But what if the sword had been called Irving? Suddenly there isn’t any magic any more; just laughter.

Those of you who have read The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley and/or The River of Dancing Gods by Jack L. Chalker will probably know where I am heading. But to get there, I want to take a winding path, so let’s digress a moment.

To me, words have shapes, and they fit together with other words to make patterns. If the pattern is pretty then the sentence is elegant. If the sentence is elegant then it will sound right. And if it sounds right, it is right. I always feel the shapes of words and sentences in my mind, and that shape always defines my feelings towards the piece of writing. The shapes aren’t specific. Samuel R. Delany is on record as saying that to him the word “the” is a greyish ellipsoid about four feet high that balances on the floor a yard away. I wouldn’t go that far, but nonetheless I understand exactly what he means. I don’t think I see the same word in the same shape twice; and the shapes are always abstract. (Can a shape be abstract? Yes damnit. I can’t help the way my mind works.)

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the way I see word shapes has to do with Maori place names. As most of you probably know, I’m a Pom, and so Maori is very foreign to me.

I didn’t grow up with the names and the sounds as most of you did, and it is all quite strange. And yet, when I drive my car and a signpost flashes by in less than a second, I can tell you the name on that signpost, while my passengers are still asking each other what it said. I have the whole shape of it in my head, and I simply run my tongue up and down its hills and valleys. I do it without thinking. (Interestingly, I can’t do it if the word has more than about a dozen letters in it. Maybe the shape is too complex?) It helps, of course that Maori is very phonetic; but that isn’t the whole of the story. If it were, everyone would be able to do it.

Because I have such an extreme obsession about the shapes of words and the patterns they make in a sentence, I find that for me there is no such thing as a synonym. Only one word will do. Even if another word has almost the same meaning, the shape will be wrong, the pattern ugly. Alfred Bester has said much the same thing (though he sees words as colour, and context defines the shade), and I go all the way with that.

Hence of course, my antipathy to a lot of writers. They make ugly patterns. My particular hate (I’ve mentioned him many times in this column) is James P. Hogan. He writes with two left feet, beating the words into submission, sawing off the edges to try and make them fit together. There is no harmony in his writing; the patterns are wrong, and they bleed.

All of which brings us back to The Mists of Avalon and The River of Dancing Gods (remember them?)

Let me confess first of all that I could not finish The Mists of Avalon. Because of that I have no right to criticise the book as a whole, and I won’t. I just want to talk about Kevin. He turns up quite early on in the book, and immediately the book was spoiled for me. I am not well enough versed in the customs of the time to know whether or not Kevin is a typical name of the period. Perhaps it is. Bradley’s book seems well researched, and she would be unlikely to use a name out of context. But I wish she could have paused for thought. You see, Kevin is also a modern name, and it has unfortunate connotations. It is so wimpish. When you pick the members of your rugby team, isn’t there always one person that you don’t want at any price because he will be more of a liability than an asset? And isn’t he always called Kevin?

It is the wrong name. It has the wrong shape. Jagged and sharp, it cuts through my mind and I can’t believe in Kevin at all. For me, he doesn’t fit into the world of the story, and I get the same feeling that is engendered by The Lay of Kevin and Jennifer that I talked about back at the beginning.

Generally writers know all this by instinct. After all, why do you think that Tolkien never actually wrote The Lay of Kevin and Jennifer? If he had written it, it could have been very funny. The right shape for a serious story is seldom the right pattern for a farce. Hence, of course, a sword called Irving. I have no quarrel with this choice of name. Chalker knew exactly what he was doing in The River of Dancing Gods. If the sword had been called Excalibur, the book wouldn’t have been half so much fun.