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I’ve been doing a lot of pondering about names. How they change, how they represent us, where they come from and why.

Cyanide and Happiness has a great comic titled The Life Stages of Roberts, about how a single name carries completely different associations and how that can change throughout a person’s life. 

People in the LGBT+ community are well acquainted with the way people can be uplifted or protected or harmed by the names others choose to use for us. For a well-known literary example, I like to point at the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, a man of many names: 

• he was born Jean Valjean, a family name shared by a really delightful number of his relatives

• Upon being imprisoned in the bagne, he was designated Prisoner 24601, meant to rob him of his personhood 

• But the other prisoners called him Jean le Cric, or Jean the Jackscrew, because his impressive strength

• In Montreuil-sur-Mer, he constructed a new name and identity as Father Madeline (itself a reference to Mary Magdalene, and all the Biblical allusions that entails), in an attempt to escape the crushing stigma of being an ex-convict

• Then when he was re-arrested and given a new designation: Prisoner 9430 (which, alas, doesn’t go to music nearly as well as his more famous number)

• Upon his escape he takes shelter with a friend from his past and assumes the identity of the friend’s brother: Ultime Fauchelevant, which provides him safety

• Except when he’s held hostage and made to send a note under duress by villains who only know the initials of his assumed name, so he signs it Urbain Fabre 

• While at Paris he’s also sneaking around anonymously giving out gobs of money to the poor while dressed in rags, earning himself the name The Beggar Who Gives Alms, while also using the name Leblanc as an alias

• At this point he’s also adopted a daughter, who calls him Papa— until he makes the choice to distance himself from her for her protection, and insists that she only refer to him as Monsieur Jean 

Each of those names carries vastly different contexts and meanings. Some of them signify respect, some derision, some are shields to protect him from scrutiny, some are weapons used to hurt him. And that’s just a single character in a single book.

This is the first part of a four-part series on choosing names and why they matter.
Part 1: A Person by Any Other Name
Part 2: Politics of Place
Part 3: A Take on Taxonomy
Part 4: Imaginary Worlds