WHAT'S IN A NAME ???

Many years ago, I worked for a state social service agency determining eligibility for cash welfare and Medicaid assistance for needy families. Before I go too far here, this is not a rant at all against the general welfare population. A number of years of experience with several thousands of folks made me aware that there are a great many people who are truly desperate through no real fault of their own. Like any group in society, engineers, attorneys, ministers, exotic dancers, politicians, teachers, me, etc., there are a few nuts that really poison the pie. This report is a true experience with one such nut. Names are history. They are words and they at one time actually meant something. One can look at English names for example: Stone, Miller, Elder, etc. These were names which reflected an occupation of someone’s ancestor. Some names are Biblical in origin, ie: Mark, James, Ezekiel, etc. And, these names often have a limited universality from language to language. An example is the name James which in Greek is Actually Demetrious or Demitri in Russian. Names have come to be sorely abused in the modern era. Wealthy folks of certain influence are sometimes guilty of this by giving their children pompous first names to show a specific pedigree, an unearned position of influence. Examples may be: Bradford Johnson, Harrison Billington, or Prescott Bush. This makes the more swarthy among us aware that one rich family most likely married into another and we are to KEEP OUT of the gene pool, which is fine with me. Some folks on welfare come to this practice of abuse from a totally different angle. They make names up because to them it sounds good. Some claim to take portions of grandparents’ names and reconnect them; however, in my years of experiencing this, I never could make such a connection with any such mangled naming method. Thus, their children are condemned to a lifetime of ridicule or abuse through no fault of their own, also insuring they will not break out of their gene pool any too often. No way does Bradford Johnson Billington ever marry De’la’Shawna Re’nae’ela Jones. We, in the office, used to keep a running list of bizarre names and the list was lengthy. This is the experience I had with one such name. In the late 1980’s to early 90’s, assistance records became computerized along with the rest of the business world. These early computers were very limited in terms of space and capabilities compared to today’s computers. We didn’t have built in word processors and spreadsheets were too interactive with about the only real computing capability being that one could sum a column of numbers after manually entering data. All letters were capitals and it was even suggested that in the future, the computing world would make lower case letters obsolete. In no way could an apostrophe ever be entered into a computer field designed for a name. That field would accept no symbol, punctuation marks, numbers or even lower case letters. If one did enter a lower case letter, it would be converted to an upper case letter as the computer recognized only upper case letters in this field. One day, a woman comes barreling into the office, asking for me and is mad as a hornet. “Where does my arrogant ass get off calling her son ‘Shithead’ and putting that name on his Medicaid card?” she demanded! Well, I never called anyone “Shithead” and never put such on anyone’s Medicaid card. As it turns out, she named her child at birth, “ Shi’Thead”, pronounced Shi-thee-add. I had entered the name into the computer just as she had indicated from the child’s birth certificate. The computer, not recognizing the apostrophes, determined on its own the name “SHITHEAD”. The name on the card sure enough appeared, “SHITHEAD JONES”. I explained to the irate mother the nature of computer programming as a valid explanation for what had occurred. She would hear none of it and demanded that we have the programming changed to accept apostrophes. Given the 20,000-30,000 or so names of folks on assistance in the entire state, there was no chance the programming would be changed to accommodate one name. I suggested perhaps she reconsider the name and give her child a real one. She indicated he had a real name and it was “Shi’Thead”. So it ended and I often wondered what life was going to be like for little Shi’Thead whenever he got report cards, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, etc. As time went on computers became much more sophisticated and I quit thinking much about the story and newer better computing allowed for small case letters, numbers and even punctuation marks in any field. Finally an older and bigger Shi’Thead would have been allowed to grow beyond the name with which his dumb mother had saddled him. One day very many years later my neighbor Hank who was employed by a major delivery service, possibly FedEx, comes over to my yard while I was mowing and stopped me. He was laughing his butt off in amazement as he told me I would NEVER guess the name of a guy he had delivered a package to that day. He then said the guy’s name was “SHITHEAD”. I responded, “JONES”? His jaw stopped as he stood there completely dumbfounded. How could I possibly have known that? I said, “Really John, there could only be one.” As an aside: Hank came over to my yard some time months later while I was mowing. He told me that if I ever found his body dead in the yard to not try to take matters into my own hands. I assured him that if ever I found his body dead in his yard or mine, under no circumstance would I ever try to take matters into my own hands. It turns out he was going through a nasty divorce. I never saw him or spoke to him again, but I heard he had developed a quite active dating life via an internet dating site and was quite happy. That is an entirely different story.