The One and the Many - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 82

In Europe, traditions, conventions and social forms have traditionally played a part in for-
ging nations into one. This is less true of the United States, a country which is restive with
form and convention and has a rather cavalier attitude to tradition. Instead, innovation is
what Americans are supremely good at. They rank among the most inventive, imaginative
people ever to have walked the earth. The British instinct is to fit into an established mould,
conform to a given model, whereas the American impulse is to break the mould and create
a fresh model. Americans are natural avant-gardists.
Take, for example, the business of American names. If you want to call yourself Dongo
or Duckegg, what does it matter that nobody else ever has? Why should names be confined
to a few traditional, mouth-filling sounds (William, George, Mary, Charles, Elizabeth), as
with the British royal family? Why not have a king called Dave or a queen called Tracey?
Why not call your pet tortoise Immanuel Kant? It is a sign of a society free from the fetters
of tradition that Americans can call their children anything they like. Bash, Blip, Burp,
Chugger, Palsy, Bladder, Pepper, Cruddingsworth, Dimple, Aorta: all these are possibilit-
ies. If you want to give your child a sixteen-syllable name, what is there to stop you? After
all, British names can be a good deal more long-winded than American ones. The marriage
was recently announced in London between Sir James Lockett Charles Agnew-Somerville
and Lady Lucy Katherine Fortescue Gore, daughter of the Earl and Countess of Arran. The
higher you are in the British social hierarchy, the more names you tend to accumulate, as
well as the more vintage cars and landed estates.
The British have the uneasy feeling that some American names are the wrong way round.
They suspect that someone called Houston B. Thomas should actually be called Thomas
B. Houston, but that some unfortunate error occurred at the baptismal ceremony. This is
because there are not many British first names that sound like second names. One suspects
that some American names are straightforward mistakes. A woman called Meave recently
appeared on U.S. television. Reverse the second and third letters and you have a familiar
Irish name, but otherwise it is a complete innovation. There is surely a woman somewhere
in the United States called Verjinnia, just as there are probably one or two small boys called
Enry running around Manchester. A couple I knew in the States were intending to give
their son the Irish name Padraic. Since they pronounced it phonetically (it is actually pro-
nounced “Porrick”), it is perhaps fortunate that they changed their minds.
For the British, tradition is a kind of labour-saving device. Like an efficient private sec-
retary, it does a good deal of unobtrusive work on your behalf. It makes certain routine de-
cisions about your life, thus leaving you free to devote your time and energy to something
more rewarding. Tradition has decreed that the House of Windsor could not possibly call
a son Vince or a daughter Gladys. This means that the royal family does not have to sit
around cudgelling their brains over the question, but can get on with more important mat-
ters, such as killing harmless animals in the Scottish Highlands. You do not have to spend