Changing names, part one

From little Jeff to more Jeff

Sir Jeffery Amherst, ca. 1768. Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1723–1792. Public Domain. The painting is from the Yale Center for British Art

One of the unexpected features of living and working around the world was its effect on my name. As I moved from place to place, did my name stay anchored, a fixed point in a turning world? Or did it vary according to location? It turns out that, in a quantum sort of way, both were true.  

Please write your name in full

The anchoring effect came about because my full legal name became more important - in my case, that’s the name I was born with and the one that appears in the copyright section of my Substack website, Jeffrey Paul Streeter. 

It became important because I needed to repeat it in endless work contracts and visa applications and other parts of the complicated bureaucracy involved in living the nomadic life (advice: if you hate paperwork, stay home¹). And for events, speeches, and articles, I’d have to give my full name (and mini-bio). People wanted to know who I was and where I came from; my name became part of my professional identity. 

What’s your name, again?

But at the same time (and place), my name would change according to where I lived. In some places where I’ve worked, I’ve needed to have a local version of my name. In others, names just get changed according to local conventions; it might be a new pronunciation, or prefixes or suffixes are added.

So the answer to one of the first questions that we learn to answer as tiny children, “what’s your name?” became unanchored from my past and would vary according to where I was, what language I was speaking, and who I was talking to. 

A lone splash on a distant beach

I recently came across a poem called “The Name” by Pushkin. It begins:

What is my name to you? 'T will die:

a wave that has but rolled to reach

with a lone splash a distant beach;

or in the timbered night a cry ...

'T will leave a lifeless trace among

names on your tablets: the design

of an entangled gravestone line

in an unfathomable tongue.²

The poem reminds me of the importance of names in how we love and remember. When we love someone, their name becomes an object of veneration in its own right. We love to repeat it; it conjures up the presence of the beloved. Years may pass; the love seems to have faded, but mention of their name will trigger powerful memories. Names matter.

In Pushkin’s poem, the phrase “unfathomable tongue” struck me as appropriate to my own experience of naming (or mis-naming). And I adore the phrase “a lone splash [on] a distant beach”. Not a bad title for an autobiography, perhaps?

Details, details

To be honest, though, I didn’t need to travel abroad, or even very far at all, to encounter mis-naming. At some stage, and I think I missed it at first, my bank in England started calling me “Jeffery”, not “Jeffrey”. In the UK, Jeffery, or “Jefferies” is more usually a surname³. But someone had blundered and the name was printed on my debit and credit cards (the late 20th century equivalents of tablets of stone), and that was that. When I realised what had happened, I was overseas (of course), where dealing with the bank tended to get complicated by distance. I simply couldn’t face the bureaucracy it would take to change it. Weirdly, no one in the bank seems to notice when I input my name as “Jeffrey” while they have “Jeffery”. So much for attention to detail. 

JP Streeter

Sometimes, my own handwriting has been to blame. I shared a sample of that recently, so if you’ve read my post on writing home, you’ll understand how problems might arise. At university, I used to style myself “JP Streeter” when publishing the usual student poems in the usual student magazines. I guess I was trying to echo the name of TS Eliot more or less consciously, and was rightly mocked by my friends for it.

I was pretty shocked one day, however, when I got one of the routine rejection slips for one of my poems submitted to a professional magazine, addressed to Mr JP Greter. I’m not even sure how it actually reached me; maybe someone at the porters’ lodge at the college made an inspired guess. I was tempted to keep the name as a nom-de-plume. I didn’t, not having much of a thriving ‘plume’ to put the ‘nom’ to. But for me, the memory of that failed poet lives on through that name. 

Of course, we approach names differently in different languages. Indeed, even within one. For example, how we use names has been argued to be a difference between US and British culture. A gently funny example of this occurs in the play “Quartermain's Terms” by Simon Gray. You can see the scene I’m referring to in this YouTube video of the film version:

(see 16:40 to 17:25).  

El Jefe

In my 20s and early 30s, I spent a number of years in Ecuador, a country I’ve already written a little about in a previous post. I set up an office in Guayaquil, a city for which I will always retain very fond memories and which I’ll return to in later posts. In those pre-internet days, the office had both a driver and a messenger, and both of them called me “jefe”. “Jefe” (“he-fe”) means boss in Spanish. The driver, in particular, seemed to enjoy calling me “jefe”, which was close to how he would have pronounced “Jeff” in any case. The relish came from the fact that he was, in effect, calling me by my first name - something I tried to insist on but which went against local hierarchical norms. He enjoyed punning in Spanish, and he thought it was very funny to (as he saw it) transgress and show respect at the same time. The messenger, whose name was Fausto, gave away very little as a rule but also seemed mildly amused by the near pun. Anyway, it was better than at least one of the alternatives, which would have been “Don Jeff”, along the lines of “Don Quixote”. That would have made me feel ancient.

Years later, when I was working in Mexico, I was called both “Jeff-ecito” and "jefecito” across the office. The diminutive of “ito” (with “c” added after vowels) is widespread in the country. So I became a little boss, or little Jeff, in the teasingly affectionate way of my delightful colleagues. Even thinking about it now takes me back to Mexico City and the incredible team of people in that office. Names can be like incantations.

My re-naming would take on a whole other dimension when I went to China - but I’ll leave that for another time. 

Seeing double

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with another story about my name. Decades ago, I spent a university summer helping out at my brothers’ hotel in Devon. One of the nicest things about this was getting to know my little nieces and nephews. We all got along very well.

Now, it so happens that I have an identical twin brother.

My twin didn’t visit Devon that year until the very end of summer, so he was an unfamiliar (yet familiar) face to the little ones. The little ones didn’t know about twins and didn’t remember meeting him. So when my twin first walked into my older brother’s living room (I was already in the room), my two-year-old niece stared at him (and then at me) in amazement. Her mother, my sister-in-law, asked, “who’s that?” pointing at my twin. 

My niece stared again at my twin, then at me. Then back at my twin.

Then a long pause.

“More Jeff,” she finally and decisively christened him. That was it. My twin went by the family name of “more Jeff” for years to come.

Do you have any favourite stories about family names? Please share in the comments!

Listen to your gut

1. Aleksandra mentioned similar experiences in her excellent recent newsletter.

2. You can read the whole poem here: https://www.poetry.com/poem/578/the-name. I'm afraid I’ve so far been unable to discover the name of the translator. Which, as a translator of poetry myself, bothers me.

3. But not all - see the name of the person riding the horse in the painting at the start of this piece. Perhaps the people at the bank were fans of Joshua Reynolds?