NAMES AND NAMING
IN
YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE
By
Alleen and Don Nilsen
Illustrating the various chapters of our
book published by Scarecrow Press in
2007
1
“Hwæt”: The First Word of Beowulf
on Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wrist
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• Teenagers are vitally involved in
developing their own identities as they
say goodbye to who they were as
children and hello to who they will be
as adults.
• Their names are an important part of
their identities both in real life and in
literature.
• Because of this, we believe they are
more interested in manipulating and
3
• Ernest Hemingway’s 1916-1917 high school yearbook
showed him experimenting with eight different pen
names:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway
Ernest MacNamara Hemingway
Ernest Monahan Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway. (with a period)
Ernest Michealowitch Hemingway
B. S.
E. H.
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• Leslie Dunkling in The Guiness Book of Names says
that except for changing their names in relation to
marriage or a desire to separate different parts of
their lives, when adults change their names it is
usually under a cloud. They want to hide from
someone or something.
• In contrast, when young adults change their names it
is usually done in a celebratory mood filled with
optimism and anticipation, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby.
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• James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his
name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen
and at the specific moment that witnessed the
beginning of his career—when he saw Dan Cody’s
yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on
Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been
loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn
green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was
already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a rowboat, pulled
out to the Tuolumne and informed Cody that a wind
might catch him and break him up in half an hour.
•
I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long
time, even then.
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HERE ARE SIX REASONS
THAT TEENAGERS RESPOND
POSITIVELY TO
AUTHORS WHO ARE
SKILLED IN THE LITERARY
USES OF NAMES.
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1. Teenagers are more interested
than are adults in manipulating
and presenting their names:
• Teenagers are closer to the name
games they played as children
• The boys in Louis Sachar’s Holes do
this when they call Mr. Pendanski,
Mom.
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• They call the other guard, Mr. Sir, because he told
them to address him as Sir. .
• In Cynthia Voigt’s When She Hollers, Tonnie tries to
humiliate his step daughter, Tish, by reversing the
sounds of her name.
• Perceptive readers understand that Tonnie is not
only cruel; he is also immature.
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2. Place names are not as sacred
as they used to be because
naming rights are now being
sold.
• Authors of books for teens are joining
in the fun of getting new mileage out of
old place names as in the title of John
Green’s Looking for Alaska:
10
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3. Because young adult literature is
contemporary, it can reflect current trends.
Young people who are now becoming
parents are not choosing traditional names
for their babies.
• They are using creative processes of word
play such as clipping, blending, and
reversing words.
• Nevaeh (Heaven spelled backwards) is now
among the top 100 names given to girls.
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• This is similar to the Mirror of Erised in J. K.
Rowling’s Harry Potter books. It is Desire spelled
backwards.
• Donna Jo Napoli clipped the name of Rapunzel to get
the title Zel for her retelling of the old story, much
like Gail Carson Levine clipped Cinderella’s name for
the title of her Ella Enchanted.
• Meg Rosoff made a joke in the title of her 2006 Just in
Case. Her protagonist is David Case, but in the first
few pages he changes his name to Justin.
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4. People are choosing names to
honor, or at least hint at, ethnic
identification as a matter of pride.
• There is more to ethnic explorations than
names, but still such titles as these serve as
miniature “book talks” informing readers that
ethnicity will be explored in the book:
• When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue
Park
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• Call Me Maria and The Meaning of
Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
• Missing Angel Juan by Francesca Lia
Block
• Naming Maya by Uma Krishnaswami
• Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind by
Suzanne Fisher Staples
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A SAMPLING FROM THE
CHAPTERS IN OUR BOOK
ILLUSTRATE HOW
AUTHORS MAKE USE OF
DIFFERENT KINDS OF
NAMES
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Chapter One. Names for Fun: M. E. Kerr,
Gary Paulsen, Louis Sachar, and Polly
Horvath
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• In Kerr’s Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack, Dinky (a character who is
far from Dinky) names the cat she found under a car Nader in
honor of Ralph Nader, who as a critic of the American
automobile industry, also spent considerable time under cars.
• In Kerr’s Is That You, Miss Blue, she illustrates how the girls at
an exclusive southern boarding school for young women come
from both old, well established families and from newly affluent
families whose land happened to have oil on it by explaining
that Carolyn Cardmaker’s roommate is named Cute Diblee, “and
Cute isn’t a nickname either. She’s got a sister called Sweet.”
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Chapter Two. Names to Establish Tone and
Mode: Robert Cormier and Francesca Lia Block
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• Cormier’s I Am the Cheese is an example of a book
where the names are integral to the plot.
• The metaphor in the title comes from the old
nursery song, “The Farmer in the Dell.”
• Farmer is the surname of a family of three who have
been assigned to the Government’s witness reestablishment program.
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• The parents are killed and the boy, whose name is
Adam, is sent to an institution where he is regularly
interrogated.
• At the beginning of the book, the family would sing
the old song and laugh about how special they were
to have a song made up about them.
• This happy time contrasts with the grim ending of the
book when readers are left to decide which line is
most appropriate: “The cheese stands alone” or “The
rat takes the cheese.”
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• Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat books are equally powerful
but in a “glittering” and “slinkster-cool” fashion.
• The first two pages of the Weetzie Bat chapter entitled
“Shangri-L.A.” contain 203 words, with 35% percent of them
being names.
• Character names include Weetzie, My Secret Agent Lover Man,
Dirk, Duck, Cherokee, and Witch Baby.
• Names of their pets are Slinkster Dog, Go-Go Girl, Pee Wee,
Wee Wee, Teenie Wee, Tiki Tee, and Tee Pee.
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• Actual names taken from the Los Angeles area include
Hollywood Boulevard, Tick Tock Tea Room, Fredericks of
Hollywood, Loves, Shangri-la, Shangri Los Angeles, Shangri-L.
A., and Hollywood.
• Seasonal names include Christmas and October.
• Celebrity names include Marilyn, Elvis, James Dean, Charlie
Chaplin, Harpo, Bogart, and Garbo.
• There is also a literary allusion to Lost Horizons.
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Chapter Three. Names to Establish Time Periods:
Karen Cushman and Her Historical Fiction
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Most English and Continental surnames
developed during the Middle Ages were either:
1.
Based on place names
2.
Descriptions of personal characteristics
3.
Descriptions of a person’s occupation
4.
Patronyms based on the personal name of a father
or another admired person
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• Karen Cushman’s Catherine, Called Birdy and The Midwife’s
Apprentice are wonderful illustrations of these processes during
the latter part of the Middle Ages.
• Her The Ballad of Lucy Whipple shows that the processes were
still at work on the frontier of the California Gold Rush.
• The protagonist was named California Morning Whipple by her
“Eastern” parents who more than anything want to “Go West.”
• They named her brother Butte, her sisters Prairie and Sierra, and
two babies who died Golden Promise and Ocean.
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• In Chapter Two, after the decimated family has finally gotten to
California, the girl decides to change her name to Lucy May,
because back home it was “just a name, like Patience, or
Angus or Etta Mae. But in California…. It was a place, a
passion, a promise….”
• As she explains in a letter to her grandparents, “I cannot hate
California and be California.”
• Her mother says “After twelve years of calling you California, I
don’t see how I can suddenly say Lucy any more than I could
Bossie or Nelly or Lady Jane.”
• Lucy humbly asks, “Will you try, Mama?”
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Chapter Four. Names to Establish Realistic Settings:
Gary Soto, Adam Rapp, Meg Rosoff, and Nancy Farmer
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• This is probably our most varied chapter.
• It begins with Gary Soto’s Buried Onions, which he describes as
a regional book.
• He believes in giving real names to “rivers, mountains, gangs,
streets, cars, in short, the particulars of the world.”
• He thinks regionalism should have as much of a place in young
adult literature as in the adult literature of Flannery O’Connor,
Mark Twain, Sherwood Anderson, William Saroyan, and Bernard
Malamud.
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• In parts of How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff is purposely
vague about a mysterious war that has started with
no one knowing who the enemy is.
• Daisy, the protagonist and narrator, is a girl from
New York who is sent to live with her cousins in
England.
• Rosoff has her use names to remind readers of her
being an American in a strange land.
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• She compares “the concrete jungle” of the Upper
West Side of New York to her cousins’ farm which in
spring is “Walt Disney on Ecstasy.”
• She wonders why “Ye-old English version of a 7Eleven” is also a post office and a drugstore.
• And she alludes to Carnegie Hall and to Jason’s fake
smile in Friday the Thirteenth.
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Chapter Five. Names to Establish Imagined Settings:
Yann Martel, Orson Scott Card, and Ursula K. Le Guin
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• We love the explanation of how the protagonist in
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi got his name and how he
managed to shorten it from Piscine to Pi.
• The whole book is filled with wonderful name play.
• When Pi is stranded at sea and floats through a
group of whales, he is convinced that they
understand his situation and he imagines their
conversation, complete with the names he has giving
them.
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• Oh! It’s that castaway with the pussy cat; Bamphoo
was telling me about.
• Poor boy. Hope he has enough plankton.
• I must tell Mumphoo and Tomphoo and Stimphoo
about him.
• I wonder if there isn’t a ship around I could alert.
• His mother would be very happy to see him again.
• Goodbye, my boy.
• I’ll try to help.
• My name’s Pimphoo.
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Chapter Six. Names to Reveal Ethnic Values:
Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Maya Angelou,
Cynthia Kadohata, Sherman Alexie, and Others
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Name-related ideas commonly treated in YA
literature include characters
• developing pride in their heritage and ethnicity,
• feeling disadvantaged because of their ethnicity,
• resenting labels applied to them from outside of their
own group,
• facing challenges in crossing social barriers between
ethnic groups,
• having attitudes different from their parents’ ideas
about assimilating into mainstream culture.
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In Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street,
twenty-one of the forty-six chapter titles are based
on the names of people or places, e.g.
•
•
•
•
•
“Gil’s Furniture Bought and Sold”
“Alicia & I Talking on Edna’s Steps”
“Edna’s Ruthie”
“Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya”
The saddest story is “Geraldo No Last Name.”
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• Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in
Heaven gets its title from the Lone Ranger radio show, which
between 1933 and 1954 presented nearly 3,000 shows and was
later adapted into a television program, comic books, movie
serials, and a video game.
• The hero was a masked cowboy (a Superman in cowboy
clothes) always accompanied by an Indian named Tonto, who
served as his companion and Man-Friday.
• Tonto, with this spelling but a slightly different pronunciation
means “stupid” or “foolish” in Spanish.
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• An example of Alexie’s dark humor that
stretches readers’ emotions from pathos to
humor is “The Approximate Size of My
Favorite Tumor.”
• James Many Horses has cancer and
describes his favorite tumor as being about
the size and the shape of a baseball,
complete with stitch marks.
• “You’re full of shit.”
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•
“No, Really. I told her to call me Babe Ruth. Or
Roger Maris. Maybe even Hank Aaron ‘cause there
must have been about 755 damn tumors inside me.
• Then I told her I was going to Cooperstown and sit
right down in the lobby of the Hall of Fame. Make
myself a new exhibit, you KNOW? Pin my X-rays to
my chest and point out the tumors. What a dedicated
baseball fan! What a sacrifice for the national
pastime!”
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Chapter Seven. Names to Build a Dual Audience:
Daniel Handler and the Lemony Snicket Books
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• Audio tapes and CDs, released simultaneously with popular
new books are making children’s literature a cross-media genre
enjoyed by all ages.
• Daniel Handler, author of the popular Lemony Snicket books,
uses names that communicate on one level to children while at
the same time amusing adults on different levels.
• For example, the protagonists are Violet, Klaus, and Sunny
Baudelaire. Klaus and Sunny might remind grownups of the
most famous murder case of the 1980s when Claus von Bulow
was accused of injecting his diabetic wife, Sunny, with an
overdose of insulin.
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• Two other orphans are named Duncan and Isadora Quagmire.
Their names probably remind adults of Isadora Duncan, the
famous American dancer who in the 1920s was killed when
she was jerked from the back seat of a speeding roadster
because her long, elegant scarf got caught in the open spokes
of a wheel.
• Handler may be hinting that his melodramatic plots are not far
removed from real life.
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Handler makes multiple, clever allusions to the following authors
and their books:
• T. S. Eliot
George Orwell
• J. D. Salinger
Robert Frost
• Edgar Allan Poe
Gustave Flaubert
• Herman Melville
Virginia Woolf
He creates names that are heavy with foreshadowing as in:
• Mount Fraught
Grim River
• Hotel Denouement
The Salmonella Cafe
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Handler relies on alliteration both to amuse readers
and help them remember such names as
• Caligari Carnival
Damocles Dock
• Finite Forest
Fowl Fountain
• Grim Grogonia Grotto
Hazy Harbor
• Lake Lachrymose
Lavender
Lighthouse
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Chapter Eight. Names as Memory
Hooks: J. K. Rowling and the Harry
Potter Books
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• Jim Dale, the actor who records the Harry Potter books, told a
New York Times reporter that he had been forced to create 125
different voices when he recorded the fourth Harry Potter
book.
• Rowling has to be exceptionally clever to create names that
young readers can remember throughout a single book, much
less two years later when a new book appears.
• One technique is to create descriptive names as with
Grimmauld Place for the “grim, old” house that Harry inherits.
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Faculty members include:
• Mad-Eye Moody, whose one eye spins around,
• Professor Binn, who is a has-been (a ghost),
• Nearly Headless Nick, another ghost who has to
wear shirts with high ruffled collars, because his
beheading went awry and he got only a “nick” with a
dull axe.
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• She uses spelling innovations that help readers remember they
are in a different world as when Harry takes the Knight Bus and
mends his school papers with Spellotape, which corrects the
spelling at the same time that it mends the paper.
• Floo powder enables magicians to step into a fireplace and be
immediately transported to someone else’s fireplace.
• She could have spelled it Flue (which is what they move
through) or Flew as in the past tense of fly.
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•
But by using Floo, she left it to her readers to think of these two
possibilities as well as the present tense Flee, which has a familiar
ring because of Flea Powder.
•
Like Daniel Handler, she plays with alliteration and also with
combining morphemes, the smallest sounds that communicate
meaning, to create new names.
•
A good example is her use of the real Kings Cross Station in London
from which Harry catches the train to “cross over” into the magical
world of Hogwarts and to Diagon Alley, which is a play on diagonally.
50
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• She creates sets of names as with parseltongue and
parselmouth and merpeople, merperson, a mersong, something
mermish, and a merversion of a town square.
• She frequently returns to a name and reinforces it with an
amusing story or a little joke.
• And when creating names for her charms, she uses Latin roots
that readers might already be familiar with in regular English
words.
• For example, Expelliarmus! is a shouted charm that causes
someone’s weapon to fly away. Students already know the
Latin root expello/expeller in such phrases as “being expelled
from school,” “the propellers on helicopters,” and “a propellant
for an explosive.”
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CONCLUSION
Please tell us about other interesting names in
adolescent literature, and tell us what these
names do in terms of
•
•
•
•
intertextuality,
advancing the plot,
developing the characters,
or entertaining the reader.
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Web Sites:
A.L.A.N.: Adolescent Literature Assembly of N.C.T.E.
www.alan-ya.org
Arizona English Teachers Association:
http://www.asu.edu/aeta/
Journal of Literary Onomastics:
http://www.brockport.edu/english/onomastics.html
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