What's in a name?

Oscar's fine hair sticks straight up when washed, just like his Dad's, as we learned today after his first bath, a traumatic experience for all involved.


We probably made the process of naming him unneccessarily difficult, but we're both word people, so we had to make a big deal of it. Jen combed through a big names book, meticulously flagging those entries which appealed or simply amused, while I did a little research into family names and various mythologies, came up empty-handed and vetoed about 90% of her picks. She liked compact names, the more common the better. I wanted something obscure but not hippieish. Something old-fashioned, maybe. We quickly found that there's a reason many of those old-timey names popular at the turn of the last century have vanished.

We went to a shortlist, and then a super-shortlist, putting Oscar into a runoff with [Redacted]. With the due date approaching, I deferred to Jen on the final decision -- ostensibly out of respect for her superior judgement, but largely out of indecisiveness. Jen had thought that, choosing from a shortlist of mutually-approved names, she'd know, intuitively, the right one once he appeared. Instead, she took four days to decide, only announcing the verdict on the morning they were to be discharged from the hospital, which demands a name for the birth certificate before releasing you into the wilds.

We liked Oscar for the way that it looked and sounded. We looked it up on the Baby Name Wizard, which tracks and projects naming trends, and found it sufficiently unpopular for our tastes. We knew it as the name of a famous grouch (and essential New Yorker), along with the great playwright. The names book we used said it was of Scandinavian origin (as, in part, am I), and that it meant "Divine spear-thrower," which we thought was pretty rock and roll.

But since announcing it, we've been reminded or informed of a host of other Oscar associations -- some personal, some mythological, some pop cultural.

It seems it's also an old Irish name (another of my heritages), allegedly meaning "Deer lover" and having been borne by the grandson of Fionn mac Cumhail, progenitor of the Feinian Cycle, fryer-upper of the magic salmon of all knowledge and possessor of the thumb of wisdom (which is one of the coolest backstories in any mythology).

There's Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of San Salvador who was radicalized and soon done in by Reagan's death squads. He was a formative influence on my political development. In sports, there's basketball great Oscar Robinson Oscar Robertson (Coo-coo-ka-choo) and boxer Oscar de la Hoya. In music, there's jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. I'm pretty anti-fashion, so I won't mention Oscar de la Renta.

My mom's dad Ray, from whom he gets his middle name, had a great uncle Oscar who came over from Olme, Sweden with his brother Ole. This we knew, though it wasn't a factor in the naming process. Oscar was a wild seed, joining the Army and fighting in the Phillipines and in Cuba, where, according to family legend, he was nearly killed by Col. Teddy Roosevelt when the damn fool led his Rough Riders the wrong way up the San Juan Hill. Apparently, 'friendly fire' is nothing new. Needless to say, this incident didn't fit the 'Splendid little war' frame favored by the yellow journalists of that day and so didn't make the reports of Roosevelt's "Bully fight!"

My aunt just reminded me of Oscar Lindgren, Ray's best friend growing up who may well have later saved his ass in World War II. Ray got shot up pretty good in the Battle of the Bulge and had the good fortune to come to in a Navy hospital in Paris run by none other than his old friend Oscar. When the Army wanted to send Ray back to the front lines, Oscar insisted he was much too sick to go and kept him in Paris under his personal supervision. There, Ray had a fine time convalescing until the end of the war, when he was stationed in Berlin.



Here's our Oscar and Dad getting their snuggle on.