So. After seven and a half months, perhaps it's fair to ask: is Cleo a Cleo? I mean, really. Couldn't she just as well be, say, a Peggy Sue? Does she not exhibit tendencies typical of, say, a Delilah? Or, for that matter, wouldn't she have turned out just about the same if we had named her Burt?While we'll admit that we don't have any hard proof, we think Cleo is pretty Cleo-ish. After all, she hasn't worn a baseball cap yet, which means she's not a Randy, and for a host of reasons - most of them related to an apparently missing predilection for mushroom-hunting - she doesn't really seem like an Ute.
But what does it mean to be a Cleo? I'm not sure either L. or I know exactly what we mean by that, as we don't really have many other Cleos to point to. But here, in photographic form, is more or less what I think of when I say Cleo. And, viewed from that angle, our Cleo seems to deserve the name, for she too leans with little regard for her safety or for the rules of gravity, all while holding random objects in a deathlike grip.
A-ha, you say. He's joking. But not really. Because shouldn't there be, after all, some correlation between name and named? Yesterday, while playing with Cleo, I thought I'd put the notion to the test. It was a cloudy morning, and so I put George Winston's Forest into the CD player, and forwarded it to track 5, Cloudy This Morning. The soft music rose and fell behind Cleo as she tried to eat a plastic block, and rang a new bell repeatedly. Did it evoke clouds, or match the view outside the window? I can't say that it did, in any profound way; in fact, it occurred to me that the piece would work just as well if it were named something like Snorkeling over Coral Reef. It was a lovely piece, but didn't seem to be essentially cloudy.
So: oh for one. But there must be, I thought, better examples of names that fit their wearers. And, if I had had more than 17 free minutes, I might have thought of one. But that's where you come in, dear readers. Any suggestions? What piece of music, or well-known celebrity, does fit their name to a tee? Or - because we're always open to alternatives - do names not matter this much? Are we all, on some level, Burts?
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Two nice comments from two readers who remain too shy to post comments, but who clearly gave the question I'd posed some real thought. What about Grace Kelly, asked one, as a name that suited the wearer? Amen, says I. And, offered the second, Paris Hilton, as a name that opens in a classy, promising manner, but that ends in a rather crassly commercial sense. Yes to that too. You're good, readers, real good.
ReplyDeletePerhaps naming functions within or along the lines of Eckhart's reasoning--that is to say, 'Cleoness' isn't in Cleo so much as Cleo is in 'Cleoness'.… But to respond to your question more directly, I'd proffer these two names as suiting their owners: Charlie Chaplin and Humphrey Bogart.
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