A Certain Slant of Light

Round two of the "Will People Get These Names Confused?" game:

1. Linnea and Luisa?
2. Linnea and Elena?

It's... snowing. In May.

Oh Wisconsin. Why do you tease us like this?

***

We had a Toy Story marathon last night - okay, so the two Toy Story movies are a very short marathon, but we're only midway through term and not capable of sustained mental effort.

I didn't much like the Toy Story movies as a kid. Sid scared me, I didn't like Jessie, and it hit pretty much the same guilt button as "The Velveteen Rabbit": I have stacks of toys that I don't love enough. They will never become Real Bunnies or feel good about themselves, and it's ALL MY FAULT because I am insufficiently affectionate toward them.

Actually, Toy Story still hits the velveteen rabbit guilt button. I spent the rest of the evening after the marathon cuddling the little stuffed dog I keep in my room, which doesn't even have a name. I once gave it a name and forgot it and renamed it and forgot that too. It probably cries itself to sleep when I'm in classes. I love it less than my cell phone, you guys. (My cell phone has been named Ariel, by the way. In a Shakespeare way, not a Little Mermaid way. I didn't mean for this name to stick, but I have very little control in these matters.)

This affection is totally wasted on a cell phone. What's it going to do, become a Real-er Cell Phone when it gets discarded?

...anyway. Now that I'm older the melancholy elements, all those kids growing up and forgetting their once-beloved toys, speak to me more. Not just in terms of toys, but old friends, old books, old opinions and self-definitions...

It seems to me that these really are grown-up movies with a kid-friendly wrapping, not kid's movies that adults can enjoy too - it's not just that as a kid you see one thing in it, and grow up and see more layers, but that the main and most important layers (especially in the second movie) are mostly accessible to adults - even if kids who are not me like the whiz-bang on the surface. What do you think?

A follow-up to the title post before, because people brought lots of interesting suggestions.

visualthinker suggested occupation based titles, which I like, because a profusion of titles suggests a status-conscious society and because they give the world texture.

Some things (Judge X, Officer Y, noble titles generally) can be transferred as is, but doctors and religious figures don’t transfer directly and mages—well, we don’t have mages, so there’s nothing to transfer.

( Doctors and healers and mages, oh my )

The larger problem with this suggestion, I think, is that professions do need to be fairly highfalutin before the get a title. “Farmer John” or “Street-Sweeper Jane” sounds like a children’s book. Also, how do you deal with people whose professions you don’t know, or those too young to have professions? There’s still a need for a courtesy title.

ochre54 suggested mother or sister as a courtesy title (and I would add daughter, to be used for children), which I like, provided it doesn’t confuse the readers about who is actually related to whom. Plus it comes with a ready-made set of male counterpart terms.

On the other hand, sister really does sound like nuns—I might even want to use it for nuns. I may not call them nuns as that suggests habits and abbeys and so forth, and I’m really thinking more like the female equivalent of Buddhist monks, in a “they travel around and live humbly and a lot of people have a short period of monk/nunhood when they’re young” sort of way, not a kung-fu action movie killer monk way.

Back to topic. Maybe I can just have social equals refer to each other by their last names, like British books, which I always thought was so cool.

girl_called_sun suggested adding suffixes to the last names, which I also think is cool, but I have gobs of stuff to say about names and suffixes/prefixes (names, as you may have guessed, occupy a lot of my brain) and this post is already approaching tl;dr territory, so I’ll write about that later.

This morning, in my inbox, I have an email from someone called Mearag Amare.

I have no idea how this is pronounced. Mearag looks Gaelic, which probably means it’s “Christina” or something else totally unrelated to the spelling. I’ve been saying Amare “A-mar-ay,” kind of like the Egyptian mummy in Caroline B. Cooney’s book Mummy—Amaral-Re.

The heroine in that book had a pretty awesome name too. She was Emlyn. Actually, lots of Caroline B. Cooney heroines had good names. Anna Sophia Lockwood and Devonny Stratton in the Out of Time series, for instance.

I tended to like the lesser-known Caroline B. Cooney books better. Out of Time was really popular but had an awfully shaky grasp on the late-Victorian period, which I found exasperating. I wasn't really fond of the Face on the Milk Carton quartet either. But I loved Mummy and the Losing Christina Trilogy (for which there is fanfic. I am so incredibly geeked that there's fanfic for Losing Christina). Did anyone else read her books?