This article provides a sustained close reading and literary onomastic analysis of Derek Walcott’s “Sainte Lucie”, arguing that the poem presents names as poetic terms of art: sites of mimicry, misnomer, and transformation. The poem confronts the philosophical and linguistic instability at the heart of naming. By weaving together multilingual references, colonial and postcolonial toponyms, oral traditions, and etymological slippages, names are shown to act not as referential tools but as creative misrepresentations. Resisting referential realism, Walcott presents a name not as a mirror of the world but as a poetic artifact with an aesthetic value derived from its capacity to generate meaning beyond its referent. Ultimately, the article shows that Walcott’s poetics do not seek to repair the inherent aporia between name and referent but to embrace it as the very grounds of art. In contrast to dominant philosophical theories (from Frege to Russell to Searle), Walcott’s approach recasts the name as a transformative site of memory, loss, and aesthetic form and naming as a mode of poetic authorship that sustains cultural identity amidst historical dislocation. Within this view, naming becomes a mode of poiesis.

Contemporary Japanese names feature a broader range of gender expression and show a growing popularity of gender-neutral choices—trends reflected in baby name rankings and frequently discussed in the media, especially on parenting websites. The present study explores this phenomenon from the perspective of young people, who encounter such names more frequently than older generations. Through a questionnaire survey of 635 senior high school students, we examine how names associated with varying degrees of masculinity and femininity are received by boys and girls, and how these perceptions vary depending on the gender of the name bearer. The findings suggest that Japanese youth are relatively open to gender-neutral names and those more commonly given to the opposite gender. Female students demonstrate greater openess to such names, while male students are less receptive. Familiarity with a name’s bearer significantly influences how “natural” the name feels for a specific gender. The tested names that deviate from gender stereotypes are viewed more positively on girls, but they are also well received on boys. These findings are contextualized within broader trends in social acceptance and gender fluidity in naming practices.

Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived: The Surprising Story of Apples in the South. By Diane Flynt. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2023. Pp. 286 (Hardback). $35.00. ISBN 13: 978-1-4696-7694-4.

This qualitative study explores the name of the firstborn as a linguistic self-representation that expresses the parent’s evolving narrative identity. Twelve first-time parents of one-year-olds underwent personal and joint-couple interviews to explore the act of bestowing a name and the experience of bearing one. We found that parents chose names that echoed self-related wishes and conflicts corresponding to themes of belonging and individuality, ideal self, choice and control. While the child’s name evoked positive connotations, their relationship with their own name was more complex and ambivalent. We propose that the act of naming is an act of self-authorship, in which parents choose names that both establish a similarity between themselves and their child, and embody their unfulfilled wishes.

Pet-naming practices reflect the attitudes of pet owners towards their pets and their place in their lives and society. In the US and other western countries, pet animals are often given names that are commonly used for humans. This trend is frequently considered an endorsement of family membership granted to pet animals. In this study, cat and dog names reported by Turkish-speaking cat and dog owners were examined; and the proportion of human vs. non-human, as well as foreign vs. domestic names were investigated. It was observed that cats were more likely to be given human names than dogs. Cats also received more traditional Turkish names, while dogs were more likely to be given foreign or more modern human names. The results are evaluated in relation to the status of pet dogs in the modernization and secularism of modern Turkey. Historically, dogs were granted limited access to homes because of their ritually impure status in Islam. With the modernization and westernization trends, however, having a dog as a pet became a symbol of modernity. The differential pet-naming trends reported in the present study complement such observations regarding the status of cats vs. dogs in modern Turkey.

Nicknames in sports can serve a wide range of social and semantic functions. Assigning nicknames to athletes and teams can allow fans to identify with them. Such names can also become symbolic resources that fans and teams turn to when asserting their identity. Nicknames in sports come to convey varied meanings and interpretations understood within a set of contextual properties. This paper fills an empirical gap and investigates nicknames of national sports teams used in Southeast Asia. The investigative focus is on the nicknames of the Philippines men’s and women’s national football teams. Employing Leslie and Skipper’s socio-onomastic framework, this investigation reveals that, despite a certain degree of arbitrariness of nicknaming national teams, these names reflect aspects of gender performance for the women’s team, and reinforce pervasive cultural narratives of the underdog for the men’s football team. At the same time, these nicknames highlight issues around identity politics for both gendered teams. The paper concludes that the use of these nicknames and their acceptance, or rejection, can be a political act negotiated between the namer and the named.

The Names. By Florence Knapp. New York: Pamela Dorman Books. 2025. Pp. 336 (Hardback). $30.00 ISBN 13: 978-0-593-83390-2.

In December 2021, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued a memorandum mandating the use of the endonymic version of the country’s name, Türkiye, over its exonymic counterpart, Turkey, for all official activities and correspondences, and languages. Framed as a strategic maneuver to “strengthen the Türkiye brand”, this toponymic reconfiguration is a multifaceted nation-rebranding strategy operating at the political, economic, and sociolinguistic levels (Selvi 2023). The present study adopts a micro-level focus on the role that populist sociolinguistic hypersensitivities have played in this change, including the deeply rooted etymological irritation stemming from the misinterpreted linkage between the turkey (the animal) and Turkey (the country) which have led to taunts and mockery; the pejorative semantic interpretations equating the name with “something that fails badly” or “a stupid person”); and the connotational nuances arising from turkey-related puns. It critically highlights inconsistencies, operational challenges, and ineffective nation-rebranding attempts. Furthermore, it underscores the central role of the English language as both the primary target and the catalyst — prompting a domino effect across languages in the instructed toponymic reconfiguration. Ultimately, this study contributes to understanding (re)naming practices as multi-layered manifestations of symbolic power, linguistic evolution, and complex identity negotiations across political, economic, and sociolinguistic domains.

The study of the geographic distribution of surnames is a useful source of information for probing the structure of populations and their links with history, and language. The relationship between the transmission of surnames and the dissemination of some genetic markers explains why family names continue to be a rich depository of information for geneticists, human biologists, and anthropologists. In Western societies, family names are distributed in space according to patterns determined by the origin of their bearers, the mobility of populations, and the social and cultural characteristics of communities. Consequently, studying the distribution of surnames is one way of reconstructing the history of populations. This study considers the use of surnames as a basis to regionalize the surname space of Galicia, a cultural, linguistic, and historical community in northwest Spain. We studied the isonymy structure using the distribution of single surnames in 315 administrative divisions to discover traces of historical phenomena. The analysis was conducted according to procedures that have already been used in previous studies, but with some modifications that enhance the value of the information analyzed. The results allow us to identify onomastic regions that show interesting correlations with dialect and historical divisions of the Galician territory.

Literary Onomastics. Edited By Dorothy Dodge Robbins. Lanham: Lexington Books. 2023. Pp. 124 (Hardback). $90.00. ISBN 13: 987-1-666-90593-9.