Member-only story
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
How important is your name?
When I was a child, I didn’t like my name. There were no other children any school I attended called ‘Fiona’. It was a state secondary school in Somerset, UK with, at the time, about 1,000 students.
At secondary school I was taunted about my name because it sounded ‘posh’ and I wasn’t ‘posh’. My middle name is ‘Joy’ so when my name was read out in full in class, people would laugh. My full name then was Fiona Joy Bune. That was seen as hilarious. There was another girl in my class who had an unusual name for that time and she too was laughed at.
As I’ve got older, I’ve come to love my name. It wasn’t until I went to college to do my degree in the 1980s that I met someone with the same name as me and we became really good friends. Now I’ve also got client with the same first name. Even today, I find it odd to hear someone else close to me called by ‘my’ name. I wasn’t one of those children with a ‘trendy’ name where there were several children with the same name in the same class at school. One of my children did have this experience — her name is Georgia and she was often called, by teachers, Georgia 2. I always disliked this as for me it made her appear second to someone else.
It’s wise to always remember that words — spoken or written — carry meaning and power.
