Pre-Birthday Gift From My Dad

Dad emails: 

Good morning!

Here’s a birthday present that could come only from your dad: a quote from a book, thinking of you this fine morning, six days before August 19.
The book in question is The New American Dictionary of Baby Names, a rack-sized 1985 paperback edition of one of the best first-name dictionaries ever written, previously a Facts on File hardcover, and first published in London in 1983 as Everyman’s Dictionary of First Names, by Britons Leslie Dunkling, general secretary of The Names Society, and the late William Gosling, a classical scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, and an authority on 17th- and 18th -century Christian names. Despite what it looks like — the cover depicts four absurdly overdressed infants just now comfortable with sitting up, side-by-side and not looking at camera or each other — it has gravitas.
Anyway, what makes my finding it a nice bit of karma flowing through me to you on the occasion of your birthday is the entry for Megan, which is I think the first scholarly reference to establish the priority of Welsh provenance that your mother and I both understood when we chose your name that sweltering summer day, sitting in Cronin’s, the Harvard Square landmark, an eating-and-drinking establishment with polished, dark-golden-oak booths that were already decades old in 1964, and ta-da! in 1964, Newly Air-Conditioned Cronin’s! Our choice of the pronunciation Mee-gan had nothing to do with purported Irish provenance and almost everything to do with lyricism, resolving the sound dynamics that emerge when the last name is McLaughlin, coincidentally Irish. Plus of course the daughters of Lear, of whom Regan had the best name (I wonder if the name Cordelia will ever make a comeback?) and the rhyme was frosting.

Here’s the entry:
“Megan (f) Welsh pet form of Margaret, adapting the old-established Meggie. Received publicity early in the 20th-C. when Lloyd George became Prime Minister in England, since he had used the name for his daughter. Has been steadily used and has spread to all English-speaking countries, often taking the form Meghan, Meagan, Meaghan in the US. This is due to the insistence by several otherwise reliable name commentators that the name has an Irish origin. In Britain the name is usually pronounced Meg (to rhyme with `peg’ ) plus –an. US bearers of the name sometimes prefer Meegan or Maygan.”

I love a good academic feud ! He may be referring to, for one, Ronan Coghlan of I think Trinity in Dublin, who is a young Irish rider, etymologically speaking. For [your mother] and me, the point of reference wasn’t Lloyd George, it was the playwright Megan Terry, and the Dylan Thomas women who gave us also Caitlin as a second possibility.

As for Alyssa, your second name, it is rooted in the Liza diminutive tradition in the family of your grandmother Crear (Caldwell, yes?), with our proto-’60s rebellion giving it a spin. (I think the major rebellion was not naming you Abigail or some such, but I could be off, coz whatever was coming from Minnetonka Beach OR East Greenwich wasn’t gonna get the time of day with me, marvelously agreeable fella I was in those days, so I didn’t even pay attention ! Alyssa, from Liza, was a slight nod in the general direction of tradition. ) But again it was the sound that mattered most — the sound of all three names together was as poetical as McLaughlin was going to get, we thought.
It still sounds musical to my ear when I say them slowly, or scan them on the page.

By the bye, while etymology and history weren’t really involved in your second-naming , I’ll note that the same Dictionary describes Alyssa as a variant spelling of the Latinized form Alicia, stemmed from Alice, which is rooted in 7th-C. Old French Alis. Liza, it says, is a pet form of Elizabeth, rarely used as an independent name until the 1960s. And its long entry on Elizabeth at a key point acknowledges and cites, approvingly, E.G.Withycombe (author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names that we’re looking for a copy of), which provides a neat little bow on top for us at the end: “Elizabeth I of England was probably named, as Miss Withycombe has suggested, for her great-grand-mother and grandmother, both of whom were Elizabeths.”
Love,
Dad

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