Rensselaer Republican, Volume 15, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 June 1883 — What’s in a Name. [ARTICLE]

What’s in a Name.

A well-ripened sage of another century once addressed to parents the admonition: “Beware how you Nicodemus a child into nothing.” He evidently thought that there was something in a name; that there was such a thing as a name’s being several sizes too large for its recipient. Dr. Holmes, also, is convinced that it does make a difference what one’s name is. He has declared that he never could understand “how people could name a little inoffensive child that never did any harm, Hiram;” while in one of his familiar college class poems, referring to the author of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” he sings: Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith. Another famous American author, in one of his inimitable sketches, tells a story which shows that in the opinion of those untutored but profound philosophers of the Western Coast, the Argonauts of ’49, there certainly was such thing as a misfit name. A young fellow whose appearance indicated that he had seen better ethical as well as more practically-prosperous days, entered a mining camp one morning, and in response to a question stated that his name was Clifford. Whereupon, so runs the narrative, one of the frank Argonauts remarked with drastic directness that , the place whose existence t Mr. Ingersoll denies, was “full of such Cliffordsand then, in order to express his idea of the sout of name that was poetically fit and proper for the new-comer, he added to his companions: “Gentlemen, let me introduce you to Blue-Jay Charley.” To the same general purpose was the fierce exclamation o&the English nobleman, in whose veins ran the blood that is bluest, when some one came up behind him as he was walking along Regent street and hailed him as “Higgins.” “Sir,” said the Duke, drawing him,self up to his full heght, “do I look like a person named Higgins?”— New York Tribune. ,