If you could choose your name, would you choose the one you were given?

I have a grey haired aunt I’ve been calling Sheila all my life. Yesterday I discovered her name is actually Julia. Now, strange as this may seem, it’s not all that unusual for the women in my mother’s family. Jenny is really Jane, Lily was born Margaret, Nancy is Anne, and Joan was once Josephine.

So what’s in a name anyway?

Sure, Josephine has that whole Napoleonic thing going for it, but does it really compare to Ingrid Bergman in a shiny suit of armour? Margaret may have the feel of a grand Faustian drama, but I’m betting Lily the drag queen has much more fun.

Why don’t more of us choose our own name? We choose our friends; we choose our lovers; we choose the clothes we wear; we pretty much choose the lives we live; but till the day we die, most of us carry the name we were given years ago.

I scratched my head for days trying to come up with a name for PageFour.

Naming a child is easy - there are a finite number of names to choose from. Unless you’re a rock star or a football player, in which case naming your poor unfortunate after a New York suburb is quite acceptable. But how do you pick a name for a piece of software?

You could name it for what it does. But the software world is riddled with products of suspect quality called Word, Journal something or other, and Novel whatever. You could name it Fred, but that’s even stranger than naming your child Brooklyn.

Or maybe not. Fred does have a certain gritty charm; and let’s face it, we all know someone called Fred. I could make a killing every Christmas. ‘Fred - Novel Writing Software‘ could become the new pair of socks for aspiring writers the world over whose parents called them Fred.

I chose a practical name that sounded neat. PageOne was already taken by cheap bookshops on every high street in the country. PageTwo sounded just a little like settling for second best. PageThree? Well, like many an Irish person, I often have trouble with those ‘th’s,’ so that was never going to work. PageFour was the one for me.

Four is a strong, respectable number - clearly much better than three, but at the same time not as pretentious as five. I can live with PageFour.

Now, time to turn my attention to Darren.