What's in a name, anyway?

I've been teaching English to Thai students for going on three months now. These students, with barely pronounceable, hitherto-before-unheard-of names like Supaporn, Pirote, Sutamas, and Korranis, do us poor American teachers the favor of inventing nicknames that are less than six syllables and with no more than two consonants in a row. Their choices struck me as unusual, when I first heard them.

Examples, followed by my immediate thoughts when they introduced themselves to me: Supaporn="Milk" (low fat, skim, or whole); Karranis="Doi" (pronounced like a twelve-year-old's response to someone when they say something oh-so-obvious); Sutamas="Toy" (Ninja Turtle); Pirote="Kook" (for the first two weeks, I thought his name was "Goo", which I called him until I read his actual nickname written somewhere). The names are unique, yes, but I was baffled and amused each time I used them. At first.

A couple of months have passed, and a strange phenomenon has set in. Milk is now just a sweet girl whose English is improving. Doi has become a kind-hearted chap who likes to study with his shoes off. Toy is a girl whose dream job is working at an airport. Kook is a cook who I hear makes a mean yellow curry. These odd names have ceased to be odd names. The millions of random and hilarious associations that initially filled my mind have dissipated. The names have transformed now into simple names, words that somehow signify a human being, but also fail to embody the facets of any human person.

At this point, for some reason, I can't help but think of W.G. Sebald's ghostly masterpiece of a novel, Austerlitz. A novel of World War II, in which World War II, the event, is hardly mentioned. A Holocaust novel in which the atrocity is a looming shadow, a cloud that never achieves solidity. What isn't stated seems to mean more than what is.

Jacques Austerlitz, the eponymous main character, fails to mention or recognize the many complicated connotations associated with his name. Austerlitz is filled with haunting silences regarding a name so rife with heavy meaning -- from a major Napoleonic battle to the original surname of Fred Astaire to the eerily close spelling to Auschwitz.

The man's name, and all that's carried with it, just sits there, in your mind. So much, unnamed, allowed to simmer in your head uncomfortably -- the reminders, the history, the ghosts...

...all the while, my students seem not to know the sometimes off-the-wall meanings of their English nicknames, and that's okay. They are happy. And their names make me happy.

Maybe it's best, Austerlitz might argue, to know the meanings of our names, the histories. At the same time, we must simply just be. For our names are meaningless without a soul with thoughts and actions to embody them.

Drink your milk. Read Austerlitz.  They will do your body, and your mind, good.