All in a name

My brother and his wife are expecting their first child in September, and my parents are understandably very excited at the prospect of this, their first grandchild. They told my brother and his wife on the weekend that they want to be known by the Cantonese terms for grandparents, ye ye爷爷 and ma ma 嬤嬤.

My parents have been giving names a lot of thought. In my family it seems to be traditional for the older generation to select the Chinese name for a child, while its parents retain the right to choose its Western/baptismal name. It’s very important for the Chinese name to sound right (my dad: “I don’t want my grandchild to be teased because of his or her name!”), and for the characters to be the right ones – denoting positive and auspicious characteristics, and hopefully with no possibility of insulting puns. And yet this tradition is being diluted or changed already, as neither of my parents have much knowledge of the Chinese language at all – Dad has asked me to help with picking the characters for the new baby’s name. If my grandmother was still around this task would fall to her, of course. I hope my knowledge of Chinese is up to the task. I suppose I have many dictionaries and language resources to consult, and if all else fails I can read my copy of 好名起好运 (Hao ming qi hao yun ‘Good names bring good luck’) and 说性解名 (Shuo xing jie ming ‘Of surnames and names’).

It’s probably just as well that naming a child in Chinese is bound by certain conventions and traditions – if it were up to me to help pick something from sheer creativity and inspiration I would fail dismally, I’m sure. I’m having enough trouble naming this blog! I’m not sure if I want to stick with Ruminations (it was an idle thought on a cold and rainy night a couple of years ago and, I’m sure you’ll agree, is a bit of a cliché when it comes to blog names) but I don’t quite know what to do with flexnib, which I have stuck with for my domain name (because I like it) even if I don’t quite know how to tease it into a catchy and meaningful name for a blog. I would actually probably have moved from Blogger a while ago, if not for being completely uninspired in the naming department. Oh wait, I have a book I can look at: 网上取名 ─ 在网上取什么名字最响亮 (Wang shang qu ming – zai wang shang qu shen me ming zi zui xiang liang ‘Naming for the Net – Choosing a catchy name for the Net’).