DZ-Jay's Random Blog

There were a few other names which didn't make the cut. Among them,

• Rudolph "Rudy" Willymeyer
• Fig Waffleson

Funny story about one of those names: Back when we were younger, I used to send flowers to my wife addressed to funny names. One such names was "Mrs. Waffleson," which I thought sounded so silly, it still makes me giggle.

 

My sister was visiting one time and saw the flowers on the table and just assumed my wife's last name was "Waffleson," but felt too embarrassed to ask. For a while she used to call her "Waffleson," and we thought she was just being silly like us. We thought it was weird that she would joke that way when it was our joke, but hey, she's family.

 

Then for our wedding, she saw that her real last name was different and asked me "wasn't it Waffleson?" We all laughed at the whole thing, including her. It was all so silly.

 

To this day, she still has "Mrs. Waffleson" as the name for the contact in her iPhone's address book. LOL!

 

-dZ.

I agree that adding names makes a significant difference. At the beginning of this summer I visited a theatre performance by some music students setting up a mini opera based on a story written 150 years ago but which barely ever had been performed in any form, basically because it covered such hot topics as incest and suicide. Anyway, there were like 5 main characters plus a choir of another 7-8 students which easily could have been anonymous participants in the opera, but the librettist decided to name them all. Even if they only had like 2 lines of soloist singing each, they became more integrated into the play than without character names.

Yeah, it's amazing how it works: one moment there's some random, anonymous elf doing something; the next, he has a name and you can identify with his personality.

 

And it's just the name -- with it comes all sorts of information that can be inferred.

 

For example, originally the story had a "toy engineer" trigger the alarm. When I came up with the name Tobias Honeywood, it sounded so important and had such gravitas, that I couldn't help but assume that he was destined for greatness. All of a sudden, he wasn't just an engineer, he was the lead toy designer.

 

Same with Patricia Dashington. When my wife suggested that all the other elves call her "Trish" for short, she immediately popped into my mind as a little doe-eyed girl elf.

 

It's funny how that works.

 

-dZ.