Name That - - - by Karla Stover

AUTHOR OF: Wynters Way (gothic)
                        Murder: When One Isn't Enough (murder on Hood Canal)
                        Murder on the Line (murder in Tacoma, Washington)

and odds and ends on kindle for 99 cts.



Ever since Ricardo Maltalban touted Corinthian Leather in the 1975 Cordoba ad, I have been fascinated by words used to create an emotion. As I result, I've been looking at cars. My husband drives a Toyota Tacoma. I'm not sure what being a Tacoma as opposed to being a Portland or a Boise is supposed to imply but some company man thought it had connotations. And my Honda is an Accord. Is that even a word?

I get what the Subaru Outback, GMC's Denali, and even the Volkswagen Beetle imply, but the Senna? Senna is an herbal laxative. An advertisement for the Senna shows it going really fast, which tickles my off-beat sense of humor. But an herbal laxative seems a really odd name for a car even if  "driving,ca/auto-news calls" it one of the best car names of all times.  

Spitfire works, so do Thunderbird and Mustang, but Mulsanne? Mulsanne is a specific corner on the Le Mans racing circuit. Does everyone but me know that?

Most sports teams have good names--names that hint at where their home is--think Houston Astros reference its NASA Space Center, the Milwaukee Brewers, a nod to the city's brewing history, and the Indiana Pacers which honors the city's harness racing past. Seattle has a new semi-pro football team but they're the Dragons. I don't know of any dragons in Seattle and there are so many cool things that could have been acknowledged--the Cohos (a salmon) the Roosevelts (an elk) or the Fishers, an extremely feisty mammal often found in Mt. Rainier. Now the city is getting a hockey franchise and is thinking about calling it (them?) the Crackens. Not even Google seems to knows what a Cracken is.

Authors have to be careful to chose names that tell us about the character even before we begin reading. Jay Gatsby, Dorian Gray, Holly Golightly all work. Freesia Summers is just awful. I wonder if the author chose it because freesias are hard to grow. 

The website, "name-generator.org.uk" will come up with names based on parameters the user puts in, i.e. sex, character type, nationality, birth year. Peyton, Emery, and Riley are considered weak male names. I don't know any weak female names, and would I say if I did--especially during Women's History Month?

So go ahead Jane, be meek. And be strong Virginia or Grace or Diana. According to your name, you have to bre and we who write will recognize that.

P.S. When Montalbán was asked by David Letterman on Late Night with David Letterman what Corinthian Leather was, "the actor cheerfully admitted that the term meant nothing."