It’s OK to call your baby ‘Facebook’ | Roz Kaveney

An Egyptian newborn named Facebook will grow up in freedom – including the freedom to change her name An Egyptian man, caught up in enthusiasm over the revolt against Mubarak, and mindful of the role that social media played in its success, has named his newborn daughter Facebook . One’s first reaction is “poor little thing”, but after all, worst case, they are syllables in a foreign language – better than many names one could think of. And besides, awareness of the role of Facebook pages in promoting the revolution may be a living cultural current in Egypt all her life – perhaps the name will be a constant inspiration and a spur to action. It’s not as if the name, given in a moment of fervour, obliges her to act out all that goes with it. Her father was thinking of Facebook as a place where people can plan political action, not as the site of romantic entanglement or drunken exhibitionism that it is for most of us most of the time. People can be selective – the Byron for whom patriotic Greeks still name their children is the foreign poet who lent his name to the Greek national cause, and then died of fever conveniently quickly. The name is not burdened for them with any factional associations that it might have acquired had Byron lived long enough to get caught up in post-independence politics. It certainly has little to do with his self-dramatising, sometimes scabrous, work, or with his scandalous bisexual romantic entanglements. Once given, a child’s name has a life of its own – after a while, it is what that child is called and not what was being thought of when the child was named. Latin American or African children named after Lenin are no more expected to be finely versed in What Is to Be Done? or Left-Wing Communism – an Infantile Disorder than African-Caribbean children called Winston are to have read A History of the English-Speaking Peoples . Names reflect the enthusiasms of the parents at the time of naming – they do not determine the course of a child’s life. Christian churches may from time to time try to say that children can only be baptised with the names of an approved list of canonical saints. In the event, this has never really stuck. Purely legendary saints such as Christopher may be dropped from official prayers , but no one – as far as I am aware – has ever tried to stop boys being named after him. Some names are taken straight from fiction – Wendy was a childhood nickname of JM Barrie which he used for the heroine of Peter Pan – but only the most punctilious of vicars would try to ban it. The theory is, presumably, that only an authenticated saint’s name is good enough – but this is just a piece of magical thinking. Like most trans people I know, I got to choose my name when I transitioned as an adult. A lot of my trans friends, as it happens, have chosen exotic names, though the only Lucretia and Drusilla I know were cis women, neither of whom showed any inclination to incest or poisoning. In my own case, what started as a literary joke rapidly got shortened to make a good byline. Almost no one calls me Rosalind any more except as a tease. The child Zowie Bowie grew up to be the film director Duncan Jones – we are not bound by our parents’ whims and enthusiasms or even their sense of what gender we are. The child Facebook Jamal Ibrahim will grow up in freedom – including the freedom, we hope, to abbreviate “Facebook” to the initials FB should that seem preferable to her, or lose it altogether. Egypt Arab and Middle East protests Facebook Social networking Social media Words and language Middle East Protest Roz Kaveney guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 21, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry