“Weird names have weirder meanings - The Age” plus 2

Weird names have weirder meanings - The Age
What Does Your Baby's Name Mean? - MyFox Nepa
Ragtime and The Brother/Sister Plays Spin Black American History into Folk Tales - Village Voice

Weird names have weirder meanings - The Age

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 02:49 PM PST

Holy horse mackerels! ... Katie Holmes and oddly named daughter Suri Cruise.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes might have thought twice about naming their daughter Suri if they'd known that it means "pickpocket" in Japanese, "turned sour" in French, and "horse mackerels" in Italian.

Today Translations, a London-based translation company, is offering parents-to-be - particularly celebrities - the chance to check the meaning of prospective baby names in other languages.

For £1000 ($1814), the company's linguists will carry out a "basic name translation audit" of names, checking their meaning in 100 languages, or more for an additional cost.

While open to everyone, the firm said it expects the service to attract celebrity clients who are known for giving their babies unusual names.

While "No Doubt" singer Gwen Stefani and husband Gavin Rossdale may have known Zuma meant "peace" in Arabic when choosing their son's name, they may not have been aware it also translates as "Lord frowns in anger" in the Aztec language of Nahuatl.

Among other baby names the company could have warned about in advance are Kai Rooney, the newborn son of English soccer player Wayne Rooney, whose name means "probably" in Finnish, "pier" in Estonian, and "stop it" in the west African language of Yoruba.

Some choices are beyond easy translation however, the company admits, such as Jermajesty - the son of Michael Jackson's brother Jermaine.

Reuters

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What Does Your Baby's Name Mean? - MyFox Nepa

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 12:31 PM PST

(MYFOX NATIONAL) - If you're picking a name for your baby because it sounds nice, beware. Many names have turned up surprising meanings. But now a new British service is making it possible for parents to check the name's meanings in multiple languages before making a choice.

The New York Daily News reports that for $1,700, Today Translations will check to see what a baby's name means in 100 different languages. Besides checking to see that the baby's name isn't offensive, the company's CEO Jurga Zilinskiene said it will also ensure that the name stands out for the right reasons.

"It's so important to make sure what you call your child is the best possible name," Zilinskiene said. "The world is becoming really small."

Zilinskiene said Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes may have benefitted from such a service before naming their daughter Suri.

"It sounds incredibly nice, but in Japanese, we found it means pickpocket," she said. Suri also means "turned sour" in French, "red" or "fire" in Farsi and "horse mackerels" in Italian.

On the flip side, Gavin Rossdale and Gwen Stefani's son Zuma means "peace" in Arabic, "new day" in Mayan and "running horse" in Japanese.

Plenty of books and Web sites list names and their meanings. Some services also exist to help parents name their babies. For instance the Kabalarian Philosophy believes that baby name choice affects "the thinking, health, success and future happiness of your baby" and will help someone choose a "balanced" name for their child.

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Ragtime and The Brother/Sister Plays Spin Black American History into Folk Tales - Village Voice

Posted: 17 Nov 2009 04:13 PM PST

Drawn from E.L. Doctorow's popular novel, the 1998 musical Ragtime, now getting its first New York revival (Neil Simon Theatre), deals with blacks confronting white America. Tarell Alvin McCraney's trilogy, The Brother/Sister Plays, being given in repertory at the Public Theater, deals wholly with black Americans. Both works are fables of life in modern industrial America, cast in folk-tale terms.

Both are steeped in music; both employ story-theater-style narration, building a theatrical tension between storytelling and dialogue. Both, too, identify their characters as type figures. McCraney's are perceived as avatars of the African gods whose names they bear: Ogun, Shango, Elegba. Ragtime's people get their names from their familial roles (Mother, Father, Mother's Younger Brother) or as icons in memory's historical waxworks (Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington). Even Ragtime's two most individualized characters, the (fictional) great ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker and his unhappy lover, Sarah, turn out to have literary prototypes: They were borrowed by Doctorow from Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella, Michael Kohlhaas, in which the embittered hero turns rebel, and his neglected wife dies, under circumstances paralleling those in Ragtime.

Obviously, the mixture of elements in such works, while never quite coalescing, gives them an exceptional density. In their differing ways, both Ragtime and The Brother/Sister Plays are rich, flavorsome experiences. Even when the story runs thin, as in the long first part of McCraney's work, or when its meanings seem to turn flat and oversimplified, as happens late in Ragtime, you never feel like you've been shortchanged: Something else is always being evoked, supplying the aesthetic equivalent of moral support.

Ragtime, which hurtles its black characters into the wide and dangerously prejudiced world of the larger society, is a chunk of "our" history, a staged chapter of the allegorical narrative that tells how America became what it is. McCraney's trilogy, which prefers delving into the characters' psychology, scarcely touching the wider world at all, is a set of chapters in the ongoing lives of a black community on the Louisiana bayou. Ragtime's point, if it can be reduced to one, is how contact with other communities alters our sense of our own: "We can never go back to before." McCraney's, conversely, seems to be the Jungian notion that community is destiny: The collective unconscious is always at work, making the same types recur in each generation.

Both points are true, partially. The challenge, with both works, is to get us past the dry patches where the truth runs out into the vibrant places where it thrives. Both do this, on the whole, rather well. Ragtime's shortcomings have been much debated since its disappointing initial run. What's less well remembered, which Marcia Milgrom Dodge's new production successfully arouses, is the sense it gives of being in that musical heaven where the artists do everything right. About half the Ahrens-Flaherty score comes into this category. Dodge's production—barer, starker, and smaller than Frank Galati's original—enhances the work's tautness by linking its criss-crossed stories more sharply, and pushing for heightened tensions in Terrence McNally's book, which, as a result, seems less mild-mannered than it did, less of a problem-solving task in adaptation and more of a drama.

That approach has dangers attached. Push, and you sometimes get coarser results; tighten, and you put extra pressure on the weak links. The 1998 production's four leads were unsurpassable. Dodge's four, Quentin Earl Darrington (Coalhouse), Christiane Noll (Mother), Robert Petkoff (Tateh), and Stephanie Umoh (Sarah), make only a handsome stab at equaling them, with Darrington coming closest. On the plus side, Dodge offers a more convincing Houdini (Jonathan Hammond), and scores a memorable interpretive triumph with Bobby Steggert's performance as Younger Brother. But pushing badly coarsens some of the secondary performances, while the tautening shows up the authors' perfunctory treatment of Father, despite Ron Bohmer's efforts to make more of him. Like the straight lines of Dodge's lucid but slightly rigid staging, the production's moral lines of good and bad are sometimes too simplistically drawn.

Nothing is so simple in McCraney's works, where ancient gods and last night's dreams keep drifting into and out of the action, and the characters' dialogue tracks, with hairbreadth precision, into and out of self-narration. The constant repetition of data that results can get maddening, but it can also be used for subtle effects. Both Tina Landau, staging Part 1, and Robert O'Hara, directing the double bill of Parts 2 and 3, use it so: One remarkable aspect of the event is its unity of style. Only Landau's imagistic use of background figures, and the intentionally harsher sound effects in O'Hara's double bill, differentiate the two stagings. And, although much in both is shoutingly overplayed, whenever the story turns serious, the acting turns transcendent. Marc Damon Johnson, evolving from the stammering adolescent of Part 1 to the weary, grieving oldster of Part 3, acquires breathtaking stature.

Part 1 suffers from bait-and-switch dramaturgy: Oya (Kianne Muschett) is a youthful track star who rejects an athletic scholarship to "State" in order to stay with her dying mother (Heather Alicia Simms). After the latter's death, nothing is said about any desire on Oya's part to make a life for herself; the story narrows to a matter of which of two men she loves, and then to her desperation, climaxing in a desperate act, when she finds herself unable to have a baby. As in Lorca's Yerma, which McCraney's play sometimes resembles, the obsession seems to leave the central character behind.

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