An analysis around the question: Why my parents named me Martin?

Since our brain acquired the ability to perceive the individuality of oneself and remember other’s faces, we have being putting names on people. Most of the times our progenitors are the ones who chose our name, essentially because they are the ones who will need to communicate with us at first, but it also has to do with the fact that we are their babies, and people name things they have affection for. So, it’s pretty natural and useful to have a name.

But besides the necessity of having a name, there is a vast range of aspects to think about regarding naming people. Or at least I thought about this when I got the assignment of writing about why my parents named me “Martin”.

In Greece, about 500 years BC, Pythagoras was thinking about the relation of everything with numbers and how that could tell us something about things. So people started translating names into numbers to find similarities between people who shared the same number. There are a lot of different ways to calculate a name’s number. For instance, with the Indian Numerology, Martin translates to 8. And it means: handsome warrior. I’m kidding.

This has nothing to do with why my parents gave me this name, but if this is true, naming a kid is not only putting a tag on someone. In extreme cases parents have ruined kids lives. And it is not that uncommon to know people who have changed their original names. And I am sure that there are names that get so well with people that they have some kind of advantage over the rest. Some articles say (excuse me because of the lack of references) that people with first and last names that sound good together not only are more memorable, but those people tend to be more successful.

People choose names for their kids not randomly, but because of a relative, because it sounds good, because of a movie, because of the city where the kid was conceived or because there is a saint called that way. The last one is very common here in Latin America. And that is the reason why my parents gave me my name. Because of St. Martin de Porres. A guy who levitated and talked with the animals. Pretty cool huh? But he was mostly known not for that, but for standing up for mixed-race people. I am pretty sure that now I know more about him than what my parents know; but they wanted to put me a name of good, and since Martin was a saint that name was a good option.

People names are not like object names. You call an apple an apple, and a banana a banana, because they are apples and bananas; but people names have anything to do with the traits of the person. Those named alike have anything in common more than sharing the same name. In the other hand, our name may influence how our personality builds up. If I hated my name, I could be more insecure or even shier. If I had a catchier name, I could have an advantage among the others.

Last but not least, there is a reason why my parents called me Martin, but it is the most irrelevant information about myself. It’s more interesting the analysis around the question about how my parents chose my name than the answer itself. Does my name’s numerology know something about me that I don’t? You see, that’s more interesting than the fact that I was named after a saint.