Daddy's Home by Tony Rubino and Gary Markstein for January 18, 2021

I once had a hobby of looking into baby name books. Now I just go to BehindTheName.com to look into the various variations of the same name (for example Aarão is Aaron in Portuguese).

My Scottish grandmother was a little shocked when she found out that my name originated in Ireland.

Tony asked, about 9 hours ago

What are you reading?

The comics…

Was the book written by Steven Spielberg? (E.T. The lead character was named Elliot.)

I was born in Montreal at 12:30 am on June 25th. My mother once told me that had I been born an hour earlier my name would have been John after John the Baptist which is a holiday celebrated on June 24th in Quebec.

According to my mother, I was named after a great-aunt…

“Whose sister was she?”, I asked…

“I don’t remember”, said Mom.

My middle name is from another great-aunt my mother couldn’t remember.

Okay, there’s a reason… they both lived and died in “the old country” and she’d never met them.

But…. when I said I wanted to ask my older aunts if they remembered great-aunt Susan,

Mom said “Well, her name wasn’t Susan… it was Sarah.”

Okaaaay….

What about my middle name aunt… well… her name wasn’t the same as mine either.

Turns out the tradition is just to use the same first initial.

Plus, the relative has to be deceased … it’s like wishing bad luck on a living relative to give a baby his/her name.

Two years after I was named Susan, after my unknown Aunt Sarah, my sister was born.

She was apparently also named after an Aunt Sarah…

I know you’re all dying to hear … but no… not that Aunt Sarah…

My sister’s name also starts with S… but she was named after another Sarah…. the same Aunt Sarah as my older cousin.

So… I have a sister and a cousin with the same name, right?

Wrong.

My cousin is named Susan, like me.

Only… after a different Aunt Sarah.

At first I was disappointed when I found all this out, probably in adolescence…

especially the part about only getting the first initial instead of a treasured family name.

But since then, while I do really like the name “Sarah”…

I’ve learned a lot of the “old country” (eastern European Jewish) names we could have gotten from our 19th and early 20th century relatives…

and realised maybe we should breathe a sigh of relief.

At least they didn’t name him Major Major

Elliot is a fine name. Wouldn’t have been my first choice but it’s a fine name nonetheless…..

He gave an honest answer!

From watching “Daddy’s Boy.”

Just wait until he complains about a grade in English and the teacher’s retort, “T.S. Elliot.”

That book didn’t have much of a plot.

My parents did the same for me, though they were in their early 40’s at the time and I was not “planned” nor “expected”.

At first, I was going to be named Mary Elizabeth after both my grandmothers, but my parents didn’t want the families arguing about what to call me. I still ended up with Elizabeth as a middle name (it was also Mom’s middle name), but got Debra as a first name like so many other little girls in the late 1950s. The entire time I was in school, there was always at least one other Debbie/Debi/Debby/Deb/Debra/Deborah in my class. In fact, it wasn’t until I started my current job in 2005 that there wasn’t at least one other in the office. Once, in an office of about 10, there were 3.

@raybarb44…..I absolutely agree that Elliott is a fine name…..with two ’t’s! But what I wonder is, why did his parents name him ‘Peter’?