Names, names, names…

So I was tagged over at the wonderful Cheeze Whiz and Mustard blog to write a post about names. And I was thinking, as much as it would be so easy to write another post on baby names and the Battle to Defeat The Great Khan, I’d best find something else.

I thought about writing about all of the ridiculous nicknames I gave my poor brother as a kid, or the fact that after having my cat for 9 years, she still had no stable name (most often, she was referred to as “Pumpkin”, in spite of being grey), but none of those really seemed like much fun to write. Then I realized there’s a quick story behind each of my own names, and some of them are vaguely amusing, so I thought “eh, what the Hell… I’ll write about that.”

So.

No one ever spells my first name right; either they decide I’m “Christa”, or “Krystal”, or, in the case of the cashier at Panera a few weeks ago, “Kkkkjjjjrijsta”. Um. Yeah. Annoying. But that’s not the interesting bit.

The interesting bit is who I’m named after. Every so often, I’ll get someone who says “Oh, that’s such a pretty name!”, or “Oh, my niece is named that!”, and I really, really want to tell them where it came from. Really. Especially conservative old ladies at the checkout counter.

You see, my namesake is… Miss September 1961. That’s right, I was named after a Playboy centerfold, Christa Speck. (That link is safe for work, and there’s a fully-clothed picture of her at the Playboy site; I don’t promise the other ladies on the page are fully-clothed, though, so if you’re squeamish, don’t bother.) See, even her name is spelled with a Ch.

And all I can say about naming me after a Playmate is that my parents were engaging in some extremely wishful thinking with that one.

My mom says they got my name from Playboy because they didn’t have the money to buy a baby book.

Um. Yeah. And you had the money to buy Playboy? Besides, whatever happened to the public library?

I make it sound like I resent where it came from, and I don’t – I think it’s funny, actually. I’m sure that went over well with the überreligious half of the family, which was probably part of why they did it, and it at least gives my name some character.

What’s funnier is what happened when I was about 12 or 13 and went over to a friend’s house. She came from a very, very conservative Irish Catholic family. Well, at least her mother was. One day, her father came up to me and said, “You know, whenever I hear your name, I think of a very beautiful woman I once saw.”

And me, with my big mouth, said, “Ah, was it in Playboy?”

The mother, as I recall, looked pretty annoyed. I suspect she always thought I was a bad influence on her daughter anyway. But anyhow.

Surprisingly, he answered that that was, in fact, where he had seen this woman. He looked rather shocked that I knew. And a little less embarrassed when I said I was named after her. I suspect, though, that he got a good ear-boxing from his wife once I was gone. My namesake must have made quite an impression – it had been a little over 20 years since she was Miss September by the time he met me.

But the name is alright, and it fits pretty well with my new and exciting German last name.

Ok, so that’s my first name. My middle name, well, is pretty common, and while it could be found via various search engines, I don’t really want to assist stupid identity thieves any more than I have to, so I’ll just tell the story. The name is generally not spelled with an ‘e’ on the end. My mother, apparently, also did not intend to put one there. However, I was born on a military base (this was during Vietnam, and my dad was drafted, so…). At that time, according to my mother, the way the military dealt with delivering babies was to drug the woman up as much as possible and get the baby out. My mom claims to have been so doped up on Demerol that she either put the ‘e’ on the end herself, or the nurses did because she was too drugged up to spell. I don’t remember which it was at the time, and I like it better with an ‘e’ (though in truth I hate the name), but it’s still sort of amusing.

And then… my last name. Before I got married, I was a Bennett. With 2 “t”s. I don’t care how many times you read Pride and Prejudice (or how great Colin Firth was as Mr. Darcy, which has no bearing on my story, but I just thought I’d state that for the record), my last name was still spelled with two “t”s. I have rarely, if ever (outside of Pride and Prejudice), seen it spelled with one “t”. Any other striking resemblances my immediate family has to the Bennet family are purely coincidental. I think. Maybe.

And yet people always, always managed to spell it incorrectly. I got used to saying “two ‘n’s and two ‘t’s” every time someone was writing my name down, and it was annoying. Given that it’s such a common English name, you’d think people would be familiar with it. But noooooo…

I didn’t like it much anyway. I never really liked it, and it seemed so incongruous with my first name. So when my husband and I started discussing marriage a few years ago, there was never much of a question – I didn’t want to keep my maiden name. In fact, I couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. And this fact apparently offended some of my feminist colleagues… first of all, I was getting married (?!?!!!) – how could I, as a liberated woman, get married??? There are a lot of answers to that one, but this one should have been the kicker – you try staying together long-term with your committed foreign national partner without the benefit of some legal partnership, regardless of where you’re living. Especially if you don’t know where you’ll be living. Oh, and by the way? I love the guy, and I chose to do it. It’s not like I checked the box for “barefoot and pregnant” (though in point of fact, I am currently both at this precise moment…) by getting married. And let’s not even get into my mother-in-law’s reaction to the whole marriage thing…

But the name? Wooo… that didn’t just cause uproar with some of my feminist friends/colleagues (what part of “I don’t like my maiden name” is confusing?). Getting married in Germany, where the feminist movement was/is rather hardcore, was real fun. I had to sign something like a 4-page document at City Hall saying that no, I really did understand that I really don’t have to take my husband’s name, and I know all my rights, and really, no one was holding a gun to my head and making me do this thing. I actually felt like that was more condescending than any pressure I might have gotten to change it (of which there was none). It was like… a big deal. And the German government wanted to make extra, extra sure that I really knew what I was doing

What’s funny is that once my name was legally changed in Germany, it was still “Bennett” at the border and on all of my legal documents for some time after that. It took me a long time to get all of that changed once I got back to the U.S., and I was surprised at what a pain in the arse it was. I think I still have some documents and customer loyalty cards in the wrong name. Oh well.

Ok… so that was my best impromptu shot at blathering about names. I tag… anyone who reads the feed of this blog (or is an otherwise regular reader), I think. (That way I avoid exposing any private journals *grin*)

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