Names
To begin, let me just say that I am acquainted with the pathology of baby-naming in the United States and we are just as bizarre as any other nation, if not more so.
Working with children in Nicaragua, however, gave me something of an appreciation for the odd patterns in their naming, one of which stems from the recurrent influences of U.S. intervention. I met a lot of kids with slightly-tweaked English names, like Jeeson, Jostin, Antoni, and Yimi. There was a girl at our school named Darling, which sounds impossibly precious in English but is rather likeable with a Spanish accent. Some names, like Yester, I just couldn't quite pin down the inspiration for.
There is also, per Spanish custom, a tradition of giving double names; calling out "Juan" will get you no response if you don't specify Juancito, Juan Carlos, Juan Gabriel, or Juan Rafael. We had both a María José and a José María, which still strikes me as interesting given the Latino perspective on the importance of gender.*
It is also not uncommon, I heard, for parents not to have names picked out by the time the baby is born. An expat I met, who had been living in Granada for quite a while, had been asked to be godmother to a local family's little girl.
"What's her name?" she asked.
The response: "Oh, we're just calling her 'baby' for now."
(My acquaintance decided to back out of the responsibility when she discovered that the family still hadn't chosen a name by the day of the baptism, six months after birth.)**
I can't imagine there was a particular dearth of choices, what with Spanish, English, and indigenous influences swirling around, but some parents seem to like sticking to what they know. Hence, a pair of brothers: Rodolfo and Luis Rodolfo. And I discovered a possible inspiration for the parents of a rather bratty girl named Valezka when I was sitting in a bar in San José and happened to look up and see her name on a bottle of vodka.
What was most remarkable to me, at the end, was that just about all of these kids, from four-year-olds on up, from Aníbal to Melvin to Yarixza, and inclusive of those (many) who didn't know the alphabet from hieroglyphics, were able to spell their names. God bless this phonetically-spelled language, and good luck to all the Kayleighs and Maddisonns the good ol' U.S. is churning out. You'll need it.
* On one side of the classroom, another volunteer had put up a poster she had made featuring pictures of the regular students with their names written underneath. For a while it was within reach of the kids, and one day a couple of bored pranksters attempted to deface it. They hardly touched the pictures (one blacked-out tooth, no horns or moustaches), but they changed the genders of all the names they could reach (María became Mario, Luis became Luisa, etc). That's their idea of scandal.
** Pets in particular aren't saddled with names if it's not deemed necessary. The family I lived with had a couple of cats, who were only ever addressed with "Get out!" when they wandered into the dining room. (I informally named them Nicho and Saraberthá, in honor of the front-runners for the local mayoral race, whose names were everywhere in town.)
Working with children in Nicaragua, however, gave me something of an appreciation for the odd patterns in their naming, one of which stems from the recurrent influences of U.S. intervention. I met a lot of kids with slightly-tweaked English names, like Jeeson, Jostin, Antoni, and Yimi. There was a girl at our school named Darling, which sounds impossibly precious in English but is rather likeable with a Spanish accent. Some names, like Yester, I just couldn't quite pin down the inspiration for.
There is also, per Spanish custom, a tradition of giving double names; calling out "Juan" will get you no response if you don't specify Juancito, Juan Carlos, Juan Gabriel, or Juan Rafael. We had both a María José and a José María, which still strikes me as interesting given the Latino perspective on the importance of gender.*
It is also not uncommon, I heard, for parents not to have names picked out by the time the baby is born. An expat I met, who had been living in Granada for quite a while, had been asked to be godmother to a local family's little girl.
"What's her name?" she asked.
The response: "Oh, we're just calling her 'baby' for now."
(My acquaintance decided to back out of the responsibility when she discovered that the family still hadn't chosen a name by the day of the baptism, six months after birth.)**
I can't imagine there was a particular dearth of choices, what with Spanish, English, and indigenous influences swirling around, but some parents seem to like sticking to what they know. Hence, a pair of brothers: Rodolfo and Luis Rodolfo. And I discovered a possible inspiration for the parents of a rather bratty girl named Valezka when I was sitting in a bar in San José and happened to look up and see her name on a bottle of vodka.
What was most remarkable to me, at the end, was that just about all of these kids, from four-year-olds on up, from Aníbal to Melvin to Yarixza, and inclusive of those (many) who didn't know the alphabet from hieroglyphics, were able to spell their names. God bless this phonetically-spelled language, and good luck to all the Kayleighs and Maddisonns the good ol' U.S. is churning out. You'll need it.
* On one side of the classroom, another volunteer had put up a poster she had made featuring pictures of the regular students with their names written underneath. For a while it was within reach of the kids, and one day a couple of bored pranksters attempted to deface it. They hardly touched the pictures (one blacked-out tooth, no horns or moustaches), but they changed the genders of all the names they could reach (María became Mario, Luis became Luisa, etc). That's their idea of scandal.
** Pets in particular aren't saddled with names if it's not deemed necessary. The family I lived with had a couple of cats, who were only ever addressed with "Get out!" when they wandered into the dining room. (I informally named them Nicho and Saraberthá, in honor of the front-runners for the local mayoral race, whose names were everywhere in town.)
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