Tags:
#the power of a name works only once
names
Were the ‘legendary’ names of ancient Greece common among the population of the time? Ie: were there people named Hercules, Icarus, Midas, Narcissus, Odysseus, etc getting around?
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The short answer to your question is that, yes, there would have been real people with the names of heroes and gods, but no, they were not common.
The long answer is that Ancient Greek naming conventions are a complex and fascinating topic. On the one hand, there are no surviving sources that explain to us how or why the Greeks came up with names for their children. Ancient authors do not seem to have found this topic interesting enough to write about. On the other hand, Greek names form a tremendously large body of evidence – the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names claims to have published as many as 215,000 so far – and the fact that most names are composed of words with a direct meaning in Greek means that they present a unique window into the social world of Ancient Greece. Because of their components and their meaning, names can often tell us about people’s place of origin, family ties, social status, cult practices, looks, and so on.
With the exception of some restrictions on the naming of slaves, there do not seem to have been any particular rules about what people could and could not be named. We might expect, for instance, that it was frowned upon to give your child the literal name of a god or goddess, but there’s no evidence that the Greeks actually found it taboo. Admittedly the names of divinities, while becoming more popular after the 1st century AD, are rare enough in the Classical period (5th-4th centuries BC) that individual known cases have been extensively discussed by scholars. However, they are not altogether absent. There certainly were people named Artemis and Leto. This shows that there were no hard limitations to what a child could be named, but only conventions by which most names were chosen. The only names that genuinely don’t seem to have been used at all were those of underworld gods (Persephone, Hades).
So what were the conventions they stuck to? One of the most powerful factors, especially among elite families, was the names of ancestors; some sons were named directly after their fathers (such as Perikles, son of the famous Perikles), while others were named after their grandfathers (like Kleisthenes, father of democracy, grandson of Kleisthenes the tyrant of Sikyon). Modern scholars are on pretty firm ground when they assume that people with similar names are related; often a name would “run” in just one family, sometimes for centuries. A related strong influence was the desire to express social status (again especially among the rich), which meant that many wealthy people would have names that contained words like aristo- (the best), -archos (leader), and especially mutations of the word hippos (horse). The latter is often regarded as a firm indicator of high status, since only the richest men in Greece would be able to afford to own horses, and horse-riding was the favourite pursuit of the leisure class. Famous examples include Perikles’ father Xanthippos (“yellow horse”), the physician Hippokrates (“horse power”), and Philippos II of Macedon (“horse lover”).
If there were no particular traditions binding new parents, they would be able to choose a name they liked. Endless possibilities are known. Particularly striking to us, though not necessarily the most common, are male and female names that contain a direct reference to warfare – Kallimachos (“beautiful battle”), Archestrate (“army-leader”), Nikomachos (“victory in battle”), Andromache (“battle of men”), Deinomache (“terrible in battle”). Other names are more straightforward, like Leon (“lion”), Kephalon (“head”) or Melissa (“honey”). People were named after cities, mountains, and, very commonly, rivers; Aristotle complains about rare and ridiculous names like Hermokaikoxanthos, a pile-up of the names of 3 rivers. Generally, words like kalos (beauty), stratos (army), agora (marketplace), demos/damos (people), -anax (king) and old values like bia (strength) and kratos (power) occur often in what we might call “posh” Greek names. Names ending in -kles (Perikles, Themistokles, Damokles) refer to kleos (glory). The combinations of these words don’t always make sense; what sort of a name is Isagoras (“equal marketplace”) or Iphikrates (“strong strength”)?
Interestingly, while the actual outright names of gods are extremely rare, by far the most common type of name in Ancient Greece was actually the indirect reference to a god or goddess. There were 2 ways to do this. First, the name of a god could be easily adapted into an adjective form, so as to become a name derived from a god rather than the god’s name itself. Some of the most common were adaptations of Apollo (for example into Apollonios), Dionysos (Dionysios), Artemis (Artemisia) or Demeter (Demetrios); the latter is still in common use now, in its vowel-shifted form of Dimitri. One of the most famous examples of such a godlike name is Alexander the Great’s companion Hephaistion (from Hephaistos). The second way to adapt divine names was to add words to them – most commonly kleos (glory),-doros or -dotos (gift, given). So we have authors like Diodoros (“god-given” – the reference is to Zeus), Apollodoros, Asklepiodotos; in the Roman era, when Eastern gods made their way into Greek lands, new names like Isidoros (gift of Isis) crop up. While it has proved impossible to say with categorical certainty that names are an indication of which gods were being worshipped in a given place, regional patterns are very clear in the evidence, and names derived from gods are at least a clear indication of which divinities were considered important. Perhaps the most touching are the few cases when parents who consulted the oracle on matters related to childbirth would name their child after the god who had advised them or after the place of the oracle.
Given all these factors and trends, it’s perhaps easy to understand why the literal names of heroes were not commonly used as names, even if there were no strict rules or moral taboos against them. There wouldn’t have been any family tradition to do so; there was no social credit in making pretentious references; since mythological figures were not always the recipients of cults, they wouldn’t often have been credited for advice or protection in childbirth. It’s possible that their names would have been regarded as old-fashioned or an ill omen, given the fates of most of them. According to the searchable part of the Lexicon, Ikaros is attested just 20 times; Narkissos a more respectable 74 times. I can’t find a single person named Odysseus. Only the hero Iason has a famous “real-life” counterpart in the 4th-century Thessalian tyrant Iason of Pherai.
Source for most of this: R. Parker, ‘Theophoric names and the history of Greek religion’, in S. Hornblower/E. Matthews (eds.) Greek Personal Names: Their Value as Evidence (2000), 53-79
Tags:
#history #names
I don’t know if we’re still in the age of Y/N L/N search-and-replace self-insert fanfics but can I just say there’s MASSIVE untapped potential for a Y/N L/N Death Note fanfiction if you just
if you just
hang on. This. Like this:
…
Light clicked his bedroom door shut, and leaned against it, and slid gently down. His attention was wrapped so wholly in the unmarked envelope in his hand. He slit it open, and unsheathed the documents like he was pulling money from a wallet. He was, in a sense. These documents had cost him. The private eye he hired had not been cheap.
But it HAD been worth it, Light knew with relief washing through his veins as he thumbed through the contents: birth certificate, social security card, medical records, vaccination history, school records, IDs with photos – mother’s name, father’s name, date of birth, eye color, hair color, blood type.
Light held in his hands EVERYTHING there was to know about the girl. And he basked in it, drinking it in, a name finally to attach to the woman who haunted him.
First name: Y/N. Last name: L/N.
Light cracked a grin, rib cage rippling with manic chuckles that bubbled to his lips and erupted, cackles, delighted trills. The sense of victory flooded him. That girl who knew he was Kira, that girl who had worked so hard to hide her identity, that girl who plagued him, followed him, haunted him every day, who he could never touch.
Finally, Light could kill her.
He rose, and walked nearly numb to his desk, and pulled out the scrap of Death Note he kept in the false bottom of the top drawer. He reveled in it as he wrote: Y/N L/N, dies alone at 11:48pm of a brain aneurysm.
The damnation felt so sweet.
…
She was waiting for him, early as the sun which crested behind her, all soft smiles and sweet squinted eyes. She was waiting for him as she did every single day. She stood there, as always – a thing of nightmares.
The blood left Light’s face once he opened the front door to her, feet and hands tingling cold, stomach in knots.
He’d been worried when he awoke to no news about his dead university classmate. And the confirmation of his every fear settled as a knot in his gut. Y/N L/N was alive, in front of him, just as she was every other day, smiling.
“You seem surprised, Light. Like you’ve seen a ghost?” Her wry smile was a mockery. Light loathed her more than anything.
“Y/N … L/N…” he muttered, through gritted teeth. “…Good morning.”
“Oh! You discovered my name. Good job good job, that was faster than I expected.”
“Why—”
“Aren’t I dead?” she titled her head and swayed a bit in place. “That’s how Kira kills people, yeah? Full name? And you’ve got mine. So why aren’t I dead?”
Kira. Light’s eye twitched. She did that. At every chance, dropping with such nonchalance that she knew. If he argued back, she would ignore him. If he defended himself, it would get him nowhere.
Ignore, deflect, probe, find a weak point.
“Is it a fake name? Is Y/N L/N a fake name?” It would be hard to believe; it would be beyond elaborate. Every ounce of documentation would need to have been faked, or else perfectly stolen, with a complete erasure of who the girl really was. Not a single piece of contradictory evidence. Enough to completely fool Japan’s most esteemed private eye. It was almost unfathomable.
“No, it’s not a fake name. That’s my name. My real name. You’re right.” She spun on her heel and walked forward, into the sun, toward campus, sunlight streaking through the wisps in her hair. “But you can’t kill me with it, Kira.”
Light refused to answer. He refused to concede. He refused to show his hand, and yet, maybe he already had… Maybe he’d already lost.
He’d try again tonight. He’d try again as many times as it took to eliminate her, this unfathomable girl, who appeared in his uni classroom claiming to be an old elementary school classmate of his, who followed him every day and spoke in hints that suggested she knew, and yet never revealed how, or why, or what she wanted from him.
He’d try again. He’d kill her this time.
“It won’t work, trying again, that is. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to use your own hands.” She glanced over her shoulder at him. “But that’s messy, and suspicious, and too easy to solve, right? So you need the Death Note to do away with me. But it won’t work.”
Death Note, dammit, she really DID know.
“Hey Light, what’s my name?”
“Y/N, L/N,” he ground out, almost robotically.
“Say it again.”
“Y/N, L/N.”
“And what name did you write in the Death Note?”
Light hesitated. Did he stand any chance of keeping his hand concealed?
He locked eyes with her, and he knew the answer was no. She knew. He knew.
“Y/N L/N.”
“Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?” she asked. And with her words, Light felt some unsettled something thud in his chest. A disquiet. An unrest. A thinly veiled wrongness.
“My name, that name, Y/N L/N, how do you spell it?” she asked.
“Y…” Light paused. Y? No… That was almost certainly not right.
“First letter, second letter, third letter. Come on. I believe in you.”
A headache was building behind Light’s eyes.
“Y…. S-slash…. N…” No. That wasn’t a name. That wasn’t anyone’s name. And it wasn’t her name. Her name, her name was—
“You can’t spell it, Light. You can’t. And no one can. No one except an extremely, intractably lucky person could even guess what my name might be, at the time that all of this plays out.”
“What does that mean?”
“What do I look like, Light? The Death Note needs a mental image! What do I look like?”
And Light looked. He looked directly at her, piercing, probing, roving, studying, drinking her in. She looked exactly as he remembered, with H/C hair and E/C eyes and….
What color hair?
What color eyes?
What name?
“I’m not anyone, Light,” she offered with the same, sweetly saccharine smile that Light could not describe beyond those words. “Or I’m everyone, I guess. I’m every Y/N L/N who reads this, any one of them. And when the dust settles, and the story stabilizes, and those markers are replaced for real, it will be too late. Because that will not be the name you wrote in your Death Note. You’ll always have written Y, and slash, and N, and L, and slash, and N, and that will never be right. I’ll be someone else by the time it matters, every time.”
Light blinked through the stars in his vision. Looking at her hurt, his vision wobbling in and out of focus on the nothing, and the everything she was. The hair color, and the eye color, and the first name, and the last name, that were every potential quantum combination, and still none of them.
He shut his eyes.
“What do you want from me?” he asked. “Why are you following me? Why do you know who I am. What do you want?”
“Nothing. I want nothing. I don’t have a defined will. It’s not like I’m a person.” She stepped forward again, hands clenched to the bag behind her back. A normal school bag, a normal school uniform, trotting in step eastward toward the college campus. “I’m an insert. And that means I’m whoever they want me to be, every time. It’s not any deeper than that.”
Tags:
#Death Note #fanfic #that one post with the thing #names #murder cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Computer viruses/attacks get cool names like rowhammer or stuxnet or wannacry but real viruses get shitty names like “COVID19/Novel Coronavirus 2019 variant” or “H1N1 Swine flu”. I think they should swap. Make computer vulnerabilities stuff like “shitty wifi router flaw #2940” and real viruses “ult1m4te de4th c0ugh d1sease”. That’ll do it
Get whoever named “anthrax” to take lead on this one
I mean, you get vulnerabilities or exploits with names like “CVE-20XX-29407” and absolutely unreadable anti-virus generated malware labels like “Trojan.Agent!8.B1E(TOPIS:E0:ahl5sYEJYaH)” and “W32.Mydoom.AU@mm” so computer viruses kinda already get shitty names when there’s not a lot of press surrounding it
Yeah that’s the shit. Let’s start talking about them using their antivirus malware description names.
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #names #illness tw #covid19 #(the Carrionites are right though:) #(the power of a name works only once) #(a different name can give a different *first* impression) #(but as you get to know a thing its name will rapidly take on whatever vibes the thing itself has)
personally I don’t think if you’re a kid you should be using your real name on the internet. very easy for people to find out too much about you. instead you should spend years using a different made-up name that becomes part of your persona to an arguably even greater degree than your actual name and then when you grow up and find out you’re trans you have a ready-made name to switch to even if it’s probably like Leaf or something
Tags:
#I have lost count of the number of people I know who have done this #names #gender
The more Jules Verne I read, the more apparent it becomes that he’s basically whatever you’d call a weeaboo but for the US and UK
The UK version is “teaboo”, idk about the US one yet
freeaboo
This line of conversation is leading my brain into generating puns on “weeaboo” with its spare processor cycles.
So far I think my favorite is “Shiaboo” for a foreigner obsessed with Iran and Persian culture.
I hadn’t realized that Jules Verne wasn’t British. Which I guess is your point.
#also I agree with jadagul#(holy shit he’s French)
yeah I did not know he was french
I guess I thought this was common knowledge? I mean the name “Jules Verne” doesn’t exactly scream “brit” to me, though I guess he could’ve been an Englishman from a French family or something.
The name “Jules Verne” screams “Brit” to me, entirely because it sounds like the name of the science fiction author named Jules Verne, who is obviously British. :P
Partly this, but also “Jules” feels pretty British to me. That might just be Julian Bashir’s fault, though.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #names
@rustingbridges replied to your post:
is that where the word ontario comes from
—
Pretty much?
Apparently some people claim it’s actually “big lake” (or the more influenced-by-the-English-name-for-the-region translation “great lake”), and I seem to have misremembered *which* Iroquoian language it was, but everyone seems to be in agreement that it’s about impressive lakes. Because unlike the Cucamonga Desert, we have us some goddamn lakes.
(I guess that means there’s a little bit of Hillhillhill Hill going on with Lake Ontario, but anyway.)
Interesting!
I’m very pro hillhillhill Hill style names, and adopting foreign language synonyms to refer to a specific variant (like chai tea or kimonos in english).
however I’m down on calling arbitrary kitchen equipment french.
>>I’m very pro hillhillhill Hill style names
It sure beats naming everything Stratford all the time [link].
And yeah, there is a certain elegance in solutions like “using the Persian word for bread to mean ‘bread made in the Persian manner’”.
Tags:
#language #names #reply via reblog #food mention #our home and cherished land
@rustingbridges replied to your post:
is that where the word ontario comes from
—
Pretty much?
Apparently some people claim it’s actually “big lake” (or the more influenced-by-the-English-name-for-the-region translation “great lake”), and I seem to have misremembered *which* Iroquoian language it was, but everyone seems to be in agreement that it’s about impressive lakes. Because unlike the Cucamonga Desert, we have us some goddamn lakes.
(I guess that means there’s a little bit of Hillhillhill Hill going on with Lake Ontario, but anyway.)
Other things that should be illegal:
“Ontario, CA”
Fun fact, the airport there is Ontario International Airport. It’s a crappy small airport, but it has crappy small flights that cross the border, so it’s an international airport!
Tags:
#one can’t help but hate Ontario California #fuck you and your search-engine poisoning #(what have you even done to deserve that name?) #(do you have even *one* beautiful lake??) #(you’re a fucking *desert*) #(go name yourself after the Seneca word for sand or something) #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #names
Tags:
#oh my god #names #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #I’m guessing this is #Among Us
Brinens and Things 