MPKGD Photo by Samir Bouaked on Unsplash
We will begin this blog with a non-full-disclosure. The reason behind the choosing of the name will be revealed later on, so hold on to your horses.
If one is a bit curious, the name Howard is an English name of Norwegian, German, and Old Norse origins meaning “army guard”, “high guard”, and/or “brave heart”. According to the very reliable internet, this is a very old name and its height of popularity was in the 1870s to the 1950s.
Quite obviously, this name is not common in daily circulation yet it’s not so uncommon that you would no longer hear the name. With the resurgence of comic book characters populating the airwaves (Hi, Howard Stark!), the name is being heard of once again. I think it’s time to bring something new with something old.
What’s in a name anyway? A lot of things, actually. Psychologist Wolfgang Kohler suggested that words “convey symbolic ideas beyond their meaning” as Adam Alter explained on his 2013 article titled, The Power of Names, on The New Yorker back in 2013. And the gravity of the name depends on the complexity of the name as well as the ability for it to be easily remembered: the simpler the name, the easier it will be remembered. Alter concludes that these studies form some “sort of linguistic Heisenberg principle: as soon you label a concept, you change how people perceive it”.
Another article published on The New Yorker on December 2013 by Maria Konnikova aptly named Why Your Name Matters talks about the implicit-egotism effect. This phenomenon simply states that “we are generally drawn to the things and people that most resemble us… because we value and identify with our own names, and initials, the logic goes, we prefer things that have something in common with them.”
This is why a lot of parents do a lot of thinking and a lot of consulting books, other people, the elderly, and other materials just to perfectly name their babies. Names have implications and they bear a special meaning for the giver and the given.
There is a special reason why I chose this name, but this is all for now.
