What’s in a name?

Some people love theirs. Others hate it and would change it if they could. It’s your name — not just your first name but the whole package.

How it trips off the tongue; the cadence from forename to surname, the combination of vowels and consonants. Along with your genes, prejudices, and all your clothing up until the age of seven, it’s something you were landed with, without any say in the matter.

You can change it by deed poll. You have to pay a few bob to a solicitor and €60 stamp duty. (Stamp duty is the kind of meaningless tax that is the government’s way of saying “THAT’S the why”).

Indeed with so many of us leaving a trail of incriminating evidence about ourselves online in order to escape our past, changing identity will become more common. It will be difficult for a future taoiseach to stand before the public as an agent of “real change” and talk about “listening to people on the doorstep”, if everyone on the doorstep has a mental image of that candidate’s Facebook photo from his stag night with a willy drawn on his forehead in marker.

But what would you change your name to? Every so often I get to experience what it would be like to be someone else, when others misspell it. Over time I have been Column, Colin, and the gloriously mixed-message Colon Regal, which sounds like a medicine to aid digestion. The taxi driver who wrote Colm Mór Egan on a receipt made me feel like a High King for a day.

But still I have a yearning for the dramatic name, the one that causes the listener to raise an eyebrow and buck up their ideas and never forget.

I could give a false name. I tried that once. When I was on a J1 visa in America I worked as a doorman in a condominium in Manhattan. This was in 1999 when Ireland was still fairly Seamus-heavy. The residents’ list of that New York condo was my first exposure to the kind of names you’d see on a US cop show.

“The victim was [glances at notebook] an Elliot Meyer, 52, worked as a stockbroker, downtown.”

Or “EH Sipowicz, what’s say we should go pay Inigo Valdes a visit?”

One name that stood out — a residents was called Orlando Morividucci; less a name, more an aria. I resolved that one day I would have it.

I didn’t have long to wait. A few months later, back in college, we went on a class outing to Galway.

We were 21-year-old students with rudimentary social skills so drink happened. The hostel in which we were staying got a bit messy. A burger ended up stuck to the wall of the bedroom (note the continuous use of passive verbs to abdicate responsibility). The owner wanted answers and our names. We all thought it would be hilarious to give a false name. ‘Orlando Morividucci’, I wrote. This was probably the one that gave it away.

“You’re no Orlando Morividucci” he said. And he was right. Orlando Morividucci was probably a marquis. I still had ketchup on my chin.

As Ireland has become more multicultural, while there is as yet no evidence of an Orlando Morividucci being a witness to a burger-throwing incident, there is the prospect of more and more dynamic names and alliteratively pleasing combinations of Irish and foreign names.

At some stage in the future, someone will introduce themselves to you as Domingues Flannery, Blathnaid Babangida, Ruairi Raducioiu or Zoltan Dooley and you’ll think: “That’s a name I won’t forget.”