Our names say something about our identity

This week’s Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

It’s something of a hobbyhorse of mine to point out that last Saturday was Holy Saturday and not Easter Saturday. Easter Saturday is this coming Saturday. Does Holy Saturday sound too holy these days?

When I started teaching German there was  a map of the country on the back of the textbook we were using. The map included both West and East Germany I told the students to cross out Chemnitz in East Germany and write over it Karl Marx Stadt. In 1990 I told the students to cross out Karl Marx Stadt on their map of Germany and replace it with the word Chemnitz.

After World War II the Communist Russian aligned East Germany changed the name of the city and then after the unification of Germany the Germans renamed it to its pre-1953 name.

 

We changed Sackville Street to O’Connell Street and yet we left Grafton Street with its old English name, as we did many of the more affluent shopping streets. Does that tell a story?

Over the years the railway has named and renamed stations. It was Ráth Luirc, changed to An Ráth and now it’s back to Charleville. On the 50th anniversary of the 1916 rising they renamed most of the stations on the network after people linked to the 1916 Rising. These days we are not passengers, we are all customers. I’d much prefer to be called a passenger than a customer.

I can still remember my granduncle calling the nearby town Maryborough in the early 1960s when in fact it had been changed to Portlaoighise, later Portlaoise in 1929.

Which do you call it: Derry or Londonderry, and why?

After the Marian year in 1954 many housing estates were called Marian after Mary the Mother of God. I can’t imagine too many newly built estates would be given such a name today. 

Many children born in in the Marian year were called Marian. A woman told me that there were so many Marian Ryans in her class in Tipperary that the students called their fellow students with the surname Ryan by the first letter of their confirmation name and their surname. It meant Marian Anne Ryan was called A Ryan etc. But it so happened one girl, whose name was Marian Una Ryan, was known as U Ryan. That would have been embarrassing for the poor girl.

Only last week BBC 2 Television aired a documentary on the brilliant Muhammad Ali.   He felt his birth name, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was a ‘slave name’ so he changed it to Muhammad Ali. At that time he converted to the Muslim faith.

The man was not just the world’s greatest boxer but he also had the keenest of eyes for justice and he was so funny, and a poet too. He refused to be drafted into the military as he objected to the US war in Vietnam.

 

Our names are important as are the names we give to towns and buildings. But is it the ruling elite of the day who ultimately decide what names we give people, towns and buildings? Sometimes the ruling elite is right in our faces, other times it is far more subtle.