I am tickled by the news that a newly minted name for a newly minted little girl is “Nevaeh” or, heaven spelled backwards.  As kids in High School we found palindromes a never ending game and especially fascinating when fashioning our names backwards to find out how they would look and sound out.

For instance:  my name backwards is Noraa (for Aaron) and Namtcehcs (for Schectman).  We had a kid in a class or two behind us who was sort of a part of our group of pseudo – intellectuals who liked such things who was called Noedig  Regnisluhcs which was generated from his name, Gideon Schulsinger.  The fun you can have tormenting your friends is endless.

Now, palindromes are hard to find unless you go looking for them.  There are some that are notorious and some that are just plain interesting.  I can’t remember the man whose first and last name spelled the same whether forward or backwards.  My dictionary gives “Madam I’m Adam” as an example and I got this one from a page on the internet: A nut for a jar of tuna.

But, this is about naming a child Heaven.  I have not heard of this in actuality although I do remember a movie star who wanted to name her son “God” although she recanted because it was a little presumptuous.  Maybe she thought of the game of spelling names backward and God would become Dog.

Carol went through this in her High School days over in Erasmus in Brooklyn while I discovered the pleasures of back naming in South Side High School in Newark. We had fun when I was learning that her first married name was Bloomgarden after I had spelled like I heard it as Bloomgarten.  We made a game of it and I would address her by her full list of names for she had quite a number.  Her name officially (before she became a Schectman) was Carol Lynn Joan Levine Lane Bloomgarden.  That would work out to be Lorac Nnyl Naoj Enivel Enal Nedragmoolb.

I think that names are sometimes misplaced.  I have asked my students at one time or another when his or her name appeared that seemed inappropriate because of how it sounded and its ancestry, if he or she felt like the name.  In fact, I did this with whole classes to generate discussion about who we are and what we are.  In one instance in a teacher education class I asked if they would have felt more properly named if they had been asked instead of just saddled with one.  This is something to think about. I did this in order to have them write essays about who they were, what they were and where did they think they were going. What do you think about it?