If you listen much to National Public Radio, one of the things you notice is how the names of all the hosts don’t sound much like, say, your name. There’s a lot of ethnic diversity in NPR’s ranks, for one thing — on any given broadcast, you’re likely to hear the voices of Lakshmi Singh, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, or Sylvia Poggioli, for example — but even the more “regular” names just have a certain ring to them: Neal Conan (any name from the Hyborian Age is guaranteed cool, right?), Jason Beaubien, Salt Lake’s own Howard Berkes, Noah Adams, Steve Inskeep… these simply aren’t names you’re likely to encounter in the real world. I’ve long lusted after a cool name, the sort of name that invites respect and conjures images of exotic lands, daring deeds, and arcane knowledge. An NPR name.
Now, thanks to the link my buddy MikeG sent me this afternoon, I can have such a moniker. The formula is surprisingly simple:
Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.
And just like that my name becomes — are you ready? — Regjinald St. Goar.
Regjinald St. Goar, named for a delightful little village on the Rhine River in Germany. I like it! So what’s yours?
I think my name is so foreign and difficult to prounce that I’ll skip the exercise 🙂
I don’t suppose I need to try that, do I? Especially, since the best I can do for a middle name is my patronymic, which starts with either “J” or “Y”, depending on how much anglicized you want to make it, and either would make my first name completely unwieldy.
I’ve been to St Goar, by the way – a very pretty waterfront town.
I would have plenty of choices for my NPR last name, though: Peratallada, Monteriggioni, Rothenburg, Roquebrune, Nyon, Delft…
Ilya Monteriggioni sounds very NPR-ish… 🙂
I really liked St. Goar. I took a little day cruise up the river past several of those small towns and decided to stop in St. Goar and tour the big ruined castle up on the hillside. That was very cool, but one of my favorite memories of my whole Germany trip is just relaxing by the waterfront for an hour or so, waiting for my boat to return, watching the barges slip past and smelling woodsmoke from people’s fireplaces as the sun went down…
That is very similar to our day on the Rhine. Only we took a boat from Bingen to Boppard, then returned by train, got into a car, and spent the rest of the day driving from one village to the next, stopping in places like Rheinstein, Bacharach and St Goar for a lingering look. Great times!
Robeart Cinigiano
Doesn’t really work in my case, does it? But I really like Regjinald St. Goar.