What In A Name

For each name Osborn provides a history, number, astrological sign, color, stone, element, and herb.

From a popular writer on the LaineyGossip.com blog comes a book about first names, what they really mean, and how learning to get comfortable with an awkward name can become a search for identity. In this book readers will find fascinating name stories that showcase tastes, perceived relationships between names and success and whether there really are such things as 'stripper names'.

What accounts for our tastes? Why and how do they change over time? Stanley Lieberson analyzes children's first names to develop an original theory of fashion. He disputes the commonly-held notion that tastes in names (and other fashions) simply reflect societal shifts.

A fascinating name dictionary that features the literal meaning of people's first names, the character quality implied by the name, and an applicable Scripture verse for each name listed.

Winner of the Premio Reina Sofia for Poetry Poems of effervescent grace from one of the best-known and best-loved poets of Portugal With the elliptical looping of a butterfly alighting on one’s sleeve, the poems of Ana Lui´sa Amaral arrive as small hypnotic miracles. Spare and beautiful in a way reminiscent both of Szymborska and of Emily Dickinson (it comes as no surprise that Amaral is the leading Portuguese translator of Dickinson), these poems—in Margaret Jull Costa’s gorgeous English versions—seamlessly interweave the everyday with the dreamlike and ask “What’s in a name?”

Latin poets and prose writers of the classical period and later used - and withheld - names subtly and to important effect. Here, in eleven new essays, an eminent international cast explore themes which include 'speaking' names, often involving bilingual Latin/Greek play; the ways in which persons and objects are named in contexts of invective or endearment; the significant suppression or changing of names; the religious and historical significances of names; the uses of names in literary catalogues; names as devices to structure a group of shorter poems.

A name always bears a symbolic mandate. As soon as false pretenders appear, questions arise as to the symbolic mandate's power, its validity and justification. Names refer to genealogies, yet thereby always involve a certain distribution of power. To arrogate a name is to arrogate power. There is a claim to power in every name, in assuming the social role that goes with it, in transmitting symbolic legacy, in social impact, in genealogical inscription. The story of false pretenders entails the moment of bemusement - one's feeling that, really, one is always a false pretender, as there's no way one could inhabit a name legitimately, naturally, feeling fully justified bearing the name one bears. No sufficient grounds can ever substantiate it; no name is ever covered by the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason. The feeling of being an impostor, false pretender to a name, isn't personal sentiment or idiosyncrasy; it's a structural feeling accompanying names - their shadow and effect.