Talking Southern No. 95 – What’s in a Name?

        What’s in a name?  A lot, for most Southerners, who tend to favor family names.   

       Your compiler and his wife, Lesley, have two adult sons, the elder of whom is Daniel Langford III (who has always been called “Niel” – the last four letters of “Daniel”), and the other of whom was named for Lesley’s grandfather and great-grandfather. Niel and his wife have two boys with family names, but neither is Daniel Crawford Langford IV, the family philosophy being something along the lines that one should probably not have a “Fourth” unless one has about four million dollars to go into a trust fund for benefit of such Fourth.

      One of your compiler’s favorite relatives was his great-aunt-by-marriage, Averee Berryman Langford (1910-2006) of Jackson County, Georgia.  The first two syllables of her name were pronounced to rhyme with “Have a,” as in “Hav-A-Tampa” cigars.  The last syllable of her name, which was the accented one, was pronounced just as it looks, to rhyme with “free.”   He doesn’t know where her parents came up with that name – whether it was made-up or came from another source, but he has always really liked it.

     Your compiler has never been sure whether he thought “Averee” was such a pretty name because of its euphony, or because he loved his great-aunt so much, and is quite saddened because the name has not been passed down.  (He would have campaigned for using the name had he and his wife had a girl-child, but they did not, and naming a boy “Averee” would likely lead to justifiable parricide.)

      Then there was the family in Brooks who had twin sons in the early 1930s, and named them Harmon and Norman, which most readers will realize look somewhat alike without actually rhyming.  But the parents, who lived WAY out in the country, did think they rhymed, and pronounced the names, “HAAAAAAAAAH-mon and NAAAAAAAAAH-mon,” each one taking about ten seconds to say.  (They had an older son named for a French soldier his dad had been friends with in World War I, but the son’s name was spelled O-N-R-E-E rather than H–E–N–R-I.)

      One of your compiler’s favorite friends was the late Ada Ballard Hewell of Fayette County, who lived from 1928 until 2023, and who had a whale of a good time over that entire period.  Miss Ada was a live wire and a true Fayette County character. But what your compiler did not know till Miss Ada’s funeral was that she had hated her name as a young girl.   

     The first reason was because it was so old-fashioned – she felt she got stuck with an 1870s or 1880s name, while her younger sister got the modern and fashionable (for 1931) name of Joyce.  The second reason was that her older brothers, Joseph and Edward, always laughed and told her she had been named for their father’s favorite mule. 

    The name weighed on Miss Ada till one day when she was a teenager, when she walked into the kitchen of the county jail (her father, William J. Ballard (1892-1986), was sheriff of Fayette County from 1943 to 1948, and the family lived downstairs in the jail, which was on the north side of the courthouse square), and asked, “Daddy, is it really true what Joseph and Edward say, that I was named after your favorite mule?”

    Sheriff Ballard put down whatever he was doing, crossed the kitchen, and put his arm around his young daughter.  “No, honey, you were named for my mother, Ada Elvira Luckie Sams Ballard, a fine and loving woman who died when I was a very young man, long before you were born.”

     Young Ada sniffed with great relief and appreciation, squeezing her father tightly. After maybe forty-five seconds, Sheriff Ballard delivered his coup de grăce:  “That mule was named after Mama, and that was one damn fine mule!”

     What IS in a name, really?  One truly never knows!