The American Name Society is pleased to share the ANS Spring 2021 Newsletter. 
We’re seeking name experts to be interviewed on this season of The Baby Names Podcast. We’ve already featured many ANS scholars on the show and always get an amazing response. The podcast is hosted by longtime ANS member Jennifer Moss.
The American Name Society (ANS) is issuing its first call for abstracts for an upcoming special issue of the Society’s journal, NAMES. This issue will be devoted to analysis and discussion of children’s literature, names, and naming. For many of us, one of the earliest and fondest memories includes story-time, when we discovered tales that had the power to inspire, calm, or chill the spirit. Although over the years, the plots of most of those stories may have faded from our memories, the names of many of those main characters and the fictional places they inhabited, have managed to survive. For an upcoming special issue of NAMES, onomastic scholars and names enthusiasts are warmly invited to re-ignite that early childhood fascination and submit a paper that explores names and naming in literature intended for children and/or adolescents. From the names of places, people, animals, and plants to the monikers of ferries, goblins, witches, and hobbits–any type of name from any period of time or language is welcome. Papers examining author names, be they real or pseudonyms, are also invited. The primary works examined may be fiction or non-fiction. The only stipulation for submission is that the primary intended reading audience of the piece(s) of literature investigated must be children and/or adolescents/juveniles.
Proposal Submission Process
For further information about this call, please feel free to contact Dr. I. M. Nick (nameseditor@gmail.com).
We are delighted to announce that the new issue of NAMES is now published! NAMES 69:1 is available online at its new home at the University of Pittsburgh as an open access journal.
All articles in this and past journals are available for free, as downloadable PDFs.
If you are a subscriber to the print version of the journal, it should be arriving at your address in a couple of weeks.
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his January 31st column, he reviews the ANS Names of the Year.
Pandemic and politics dominated names last year, along with the rest of our lives.
This year, like most organizations, the American Name Society (ANS) held its annual meeting online. On Jan. 24, ANS voted COVID-19 and Kamala as co-winners of the Name of the Year – the first time ANS has had a tie, fitting how unique 2020 was!
ANS chooses Names of the Year for Place Names, Artistic-Literary Names, Personal Names, Trade Names, ENames and Miscellaneous Names before picking the overall Name of the Year.
COVID-19 won the Miscellaneous Names category. On Feb. 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced “COVID-19” as the official name for the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. It’s short for “coronavirus disease first recognized in 2019.” Certainly no name, not even created until six weeks after a year started, has ever dominated the world’s consciousness as COVID-19 has.
Kamala was a nominee for Personal Name of the Year. The first name of our new vice president, Kamala Devi Harris, became an issue when U.S. Sen. David Perdue of Georgia referred to her as “KAH-mah-la, or Kah-MAH-la, or KAH-mah-la or Kamala-mala-mala, I don’t know, whatever,” at a Trump rally on Oct. 16. This mockery, considered racist by many, led Perdue Foods to issue a statement pointing out the senator had no connection to them, and was widely perceived as one reason why Perdue was forced into a runoff with Jon Ossoff in the November election. He lost the runoff on Jan. 5. Kamala, pronounced “Comma-lah”, is a Sanskrit name meaning “lotus,” inspired by the Hindu heritage of Shyamala Gopalan, Harris’ mother.
“Washington DC” by barnyz is licensed with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
January 6-9 2022, Washington, DC
Literary onomastics is a burgeoning subject, still in the process of establishing its status, with very few book-length studies examining the discipline in detail. Notable 21st-century examples include Leonard Ashley’s Names in Literature (2003), Alastair Fowler’s Literary Names: Personal Names in English Literature (2012), and Martyna Gibka’s Literary Onomastics: A Theory (2019). Champions of the discipline often argue that it provides an additional lens that complements extant approaches to the language of literature, rather than making any claims for general theories of literary names and naming. Papers accepted for this panel will explore literary onomastics in theory and practice. Examples of themes that can be addressed include literary names and stylistics; literary onomastics and literary theory; literary names and social or cultural theory; socio-onomastics and literature.
For more information about the MLA, check out the official website.
Proposal submission process:
A downloadable version of the Call for Papers can be found here.
More information about ANS and MLA conferences is available on the Conferences page of this website.
If you enjoy reading about names, we encourage you to join the ANS and share your name news with us! Note that we now have a new, very affordable membership tier which costs only $20.
Membership in the ANS allows access to a community of scholars and its communications, as well as eligibility to present at the ANS annual conferences, and to submit articles to NAMES.
Join today!
Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his January 17th column, he looks at the history of the name Michelle.
Michèle and Michelle are French feminine forms of Michel, French version of “Michael.” Michael is Hebrew for “Who is like God?”, a rhetorical question implying “No one’s like God.” One of only four angels mentioned by name in the Bible, St. Michael was popular throughout medieval Europe. Occasionally girls were named after him, though in medieval England there was no separate feminine form. Listed as “Michaela” in official records, they were called “Michael” in everyday life.
Though a few French girls were named Michelle before modern times, it was very rare, not coming into regular use until 1920. Before 1940, Micheline was the more common French feminine for Michel.
“Michelle” was one of the Beatles’ greatest hits, winning the 1967 Grammy for Song of the Year. Versions were recorded by many other artists. Though Michelle would probably have soon been a Top 10 name without it, there’s no doubt the song accelerated its boom. It peaked at #2 in 1968, when 2.6% of American girls were named Michelle or Michele.
The American Name Society (ANS) is issuing its first call for abstracts for an upcoming special issue of the Society’s journal, NAMES. This issue will be devoted to analysis and discussion of toponyms and literaryscapes. Although toponyms are often taken for granted in our daily lives, they carry considerable potential for acquiring personal and social meanings depending on their contexts and co-texts of use. These multi-layered meanings are often utilized by authors as literary resources for evoking associations or invoking evaluative positioning. Papers accepted for this special issue will explore how the meanings of place-names—be they real or fictional—may be effectively harnessed to shape literary settings within specific works or by specific authors. Examples of themes that can be addressed include—but are not limited to—toponyms choice/invention and their connotations; toponyms in translation; toponyms in literary theory; and toponyms and intertextuality. You can download the call for papers here.
Proposal Submission Process:
The 2019 Award Winner is:
Sharon N. Obasi, Richard Mocarski, Natalie Holt, Debra A. Hope, Nathan Woodruff, “Renaming Me: Assessing the Influence of Gender Identity on Name Selection” NAMES 67(4): 199-211.
Among the many accolades this piece of outstanding onomastic scholarship received, the NAMES Board Members praised this publication for its thematic originality, substantive methodology, and potential to draw attention to an area of onomastic research in need of further investigation. Moreover, the article was highly commended for its insightful yet sensitive exploration of an issue of great relevance for a segment of the world’s population that is often overlooked and denigrated. Consequently, as one Board member extolled, this article has the power to contribute to the protection of human rights, while championing the importance of diversity and self-determination. Indeed, as one Board Member stressed, given the high number of readers who have already downloaded this scholarship, it is clear that this work deeply “resonates with a wider community” and therefore promises to increase societal interest in the field of onomastics – one of the primary goals of the American Name Society.
