Names Across Cultures

I was sort of interviewing my sister-in-law recently about her childhood nanny. She was born when my husband was already ten years old, so there's a big age gap between them. The nanny was from the Philippines and her name was Rosy. She would use English with the kids and taught my sister-in-law all kinds of things, like how to cook and bake.

Rosy was also the reason my sister-in-law chose her current English name. She used to be called Pinky, but then there was a commercial for candy with a song. The song had something about pinky in it and my sister-in-law's friends would tease her about it. Rosy once told her about kings and queens, and my sister in law asked, what if you added Y to the end of queen, what kind of name would that make? Rosy told her that would be Queeny. So my sister-in-law decided that is what she wanted her English name to be.

The story is somewhat reminiscent of my husband's story of choosing his current English name. When he was young he was called Mickey, but at some point he decided that name was too cute. When he read that Rex is Latin for king he decided that was a cool name and his English name has been Rex ever since.

In addition, my middle name is the name of a historical queen. A random funny little tid-bit is that while I was in Romania I would introduce myself to kids. My name, Rachel, doesn't sound like a girl's name in Romania (since girl's names all end in either E or A) and I didn't usually tell them my Romanian name, Rahela, because it caused other complications (kids arguing with each other about what my name really was, Rachel or Rahela). Since Rachel is unfamiliar, the kids would often ask if my name was Regina, a familiar word to them. Regina in Romanian just happens to mean queen.

In Romania, Rex is a dog's name. I suppose I could always have call him Rege (Re-Jeh) if I had wanted to avoid his being referred to as "The Dog Rex".