What's in a name?

Apparently my name lacks character. Upon looking a couple of days ago at the new baby name rankings (Isabella indeed), I ended up through a series of links at a baby name site of apparently great popularity. Always curious, I punched in my name. Their assessment? It was along the lines of "trendy for a while, but lacks the character of Alice."

I was never aware that my name was trendy. Seriously, I've literally lost count of all the Amanda's I've ever met; I know only one other Alicia personally at this point, and I don't even know her all that well.

There is an amusing story about how I came to be Alicia. As I recall, the name my mother used in Spanish class in high school was Alicia--said "ah-lees-cee-ah"--and she developed a lasting fondness for the name. I was born when my mother was nineteen (admittedly, she turned twenty a couple of weeks later) and therefore I suppose she didn't have time to change her mind and be swayed by whatever her favorite pop star or soap opera maven was naming their offspring. Alicia--said "ah-lee-sha"--was the only name my parents had picked out for their firstborn. Hilariously, everybody was confident I was going to be a boy because of various pieces of folk wisdom having to do with my size (big) and such. I suppose it's a good thing all around I was a girl after all; I don't know what my parent's would have called me (at a guess, William after my mother's father, as my father's father long ago threatened to disinherit any descendant given his given name--Arnold. Which nobody calls him. Everybody calls him Hutch, including my grandmother.)

I rather like my name, frankly. I even liked it when teachers in my middle and high school careers used to mark me absent because they expected to be a Latino. Or when people butcher how to say my name, sometimes by calling me some-other-name-that-starts-with-"A" entirely (there are admittedly a variety of ways to pronounce "Alicia", but none of them as far as I know involve saying it as "Allison.") I even like it, in this age of contact lists and cell phones, when people accidentally call me on a regular basis. My name starting with the letter "A", which means that cell phones, when smooshed in pockets and accidentally calling someone, often call me, leaving me to listen to the humdrum sounds of whatever shopping mall they happen to be in at the time while going "Hello?..." to empty air.

See, I don't accidentally call people on MY cell phone. I just inadvertently take pictures of the inside of my pockets, which is TOTALLY DIFFERENT.

The other problem with having a name that starts with an "A" is that on Facebook I swear to god I get more spam than most people. This is because when those stupid quizes and games ask you to "pick 15 friends" I'm almost always near the top of the list, and thus easy to click, rather than buried somewhere near the bottom. It almost makes me wish my parents called me Zelda (perhaps if I was seven or eight years younger they would've--my mom is a big classic Legend of Zelda fan). This has become less of a problem since I figured out how to block aps on Facebook, though, which makes me happy: I used to get so much facebook spam I had a hard time actually finding postings I might want to see, which led to friends inviting me out and me not finding out about it until six months after they'd stopped wondering why I never bothered to respond.

Alicia, for the record, means either, from the German Adelaide, "noble or exalted", or from the Greek Aletheia, "truth." At least one baby name book I've seen splits the difference and claims it means "noble truth." Since my middle name, Audrey, means "noble strength" I seem to have a surplus of nobility kicking around my moniker. You'd think that'd make me somewhat more dignified....but you'd be wrong. (there is no nobility in my surname thankfully. It means "the son of short Hugh." My father is in fact short, but his name is David. Come to think of it, my married name means "Short Man", so clearly there isn't much tallness in my last name, married or otherwise.)

Could have been worse, though. My parents could've named me Grace. Since I regularly trip over air and recently managed to fall on my face while tripping over a jump rope (which I then got entangled in a ceiling fan), I could live without being a walking case of irony.