To try to talk some sense into my staggering brain, we are going to go through an exercise in Latin verb conjugation. Now, my Latin is worse than my Greek and both have admittedly suffered years of disuse, but I hope I can still do this accurately. And excuse me if I ignore the accents -- my old professor would kill me, but in the wonderful world of the internet accents are really more trouble than they are worth for my silly rhetorical exercises.

Amo is the verb "to love". Its principal parts are amo, amare, amavi, amatum. Now, I could conjugate the whole darn thing for you, but no one wants to sit through that. Let's cut to the chase. To make the future passive participle, you take the present stem, ama, and add the endings -ndus, -nda, -ndum (masculine, feminine, and neuter, respectively.) Now you may be wondering precisely how one translates a future passive participle. (The one who will have been loved? Huh?) The trick is that in Latin this participle means "worthy" or "deserving". Therefore one might infer that amanda means "she who is deserving to be loved".

I always remember knowing what my name meant but of course it wasn't until I learned Latin that I realized that it was a clear, basic translation rather than a matter of some sort of distant etymology. I remember distinctly the day in class that the professor conjugated and translated the participles of amo on the board, and pointed out, without referencing me in particular, that the name Amanda was a direct translation of the participle. Unfortunately one of my classmates was not so tactful -- the one who was always just a little too chummy, a little too coy, at that moment turned around from the front row and grinned sweetly at me, as a first-grader may have upon being read a story in which one of his friends' names figured prominently. I cringed and wished I were somewhere else. But I never forgot that class.

I harp on names a lot here -- mostly the names of places rather than the names of people. Mostly I write about how knowing the names of places can make you feel closer to them or feel more ownership of them. Once upon a time I wrote a paper for a class about naming magic -- the power of name-giving in a bunch of literary works, including Genesis, Rumpelstiltskin, and some obscure fiction we had read in class that semester. It’s nothing really –- hell, it’s just a literary device. That’s all it is. But here I am, in this literary world I have created, here I am as a character living in this world of text and spiderwebby images -– since this is true, let us have literary devices, let us believe in them and live by them. Since this is creative writing, let my name have power over me, let the meaning guide my life, let the ancient suggestion of a dead language live as something real. Let me be Amanda, let me be worthy of love, let my life proceed as though some author had chosen this name with the intent for it to be symbolic in this story somewhere down the line. Because if I write this, if I proclaim it, then maybe I can believe it, and if I believe it, then maybe whether it is true or not it will keep me from going insane.

Which brings me to my middle name: Hope. For the love of everything, let there be hope for me, at least. I don’t even have to do a translation to ask for that one to come true.

You may have known this already, but today we were playing around on a name origins site and we discovered that "Amanda" was first used as a name by a 17th-century playwright.

Well, I suppose that's more interesting than names that come from well-known sources like the Bible. Or Greek epic. :-p

Hey, I bet Amanda was at least a character who did things in the play, not a one-off reference :^P

I would be so interested in reading your paper on naming magic! Of course, here I am out of the blue, saying that, but I am intrigued.