What's in a Name Anyway?

First off, I want to throw out there that The Engineer enjoyed Twilight and completely understood it. So, they did well enough on the movie so that you don't HAVE to have read the books to understand the movie. I will say again that it helped, though.

On another note, though, when we were out this weekend, I ran across an individual with a most unfortunate name. Naturally, I only saw their name on the obligatory retail store name tag, and I didn't talk to the person about it. Then again, I'm probably one of a handful of people who would have seen this person that would even have known this tidbit of information. I'm sure most people who see it think, "oh, that's different" and move on. But not me. Oh no. I've got to analyze it.

Sometimes, parents want to give their children common names with clever spellings to make them feel unique and give their future teachers (employers) hell when trying to spell their names correctly. This only leads to the child catching hell for the rest of their lives since they go with life with an "extended name" of sorts -- that being "name" with "weirdness." (eg. Wendy with an "i" [Wendi] or Jennifer with one "n" [Jenifer].) Normally, these respellings only cause an annoyance for the owner and don't have a completely different and sinister meaning such and the person I saw this weekend.

This weekend, I saw someone named Charon stocking a shelf. Now, I'm sure Charon's parents felt they were being terribly clever by torturing their newborn baby girl with "Sharon with a C" to help her normal name feel a bit different in a world of Sharon's. When we were walking around and I spotted this name, I told the Queen that I thought it had to do with Hell in some language's mythology, but I couldn't quite remember at the time. I looked it up this morning because it was bothering me still.

What her parents probably did not realize through their ignorance of Greek mythology is that Charon is "the ferryman of Hades who carried souls of the newly deceased across the river that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. A coin to pay Charon for passage, usually an obolus or danake, was sometimes placed in or on the mouth of a dead person. Some authors say that those who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, had to wander the shores for one hundred years. In the catabasis mytheme, heroes — such as Heracles, Orpheus, Aeneas, Dionysus and Psyche — journey to the underworld and return, still alive, conveyed by the boat of Charon." (Lifted from Wikipedia)

This means that Charon is actually a male name, not female. He's got a couple of different names depending on the mythology you're looking at, but Charon is his Greek and primary one. Charon is usually depicted as a cranky and skinny old man in a cloth that is falling off of his bits and pieces or more modernly, the Grim Reaper, but I think this one is more amusing, and is found in the lower right hand corner of Michelangelo's Last Judgment painting in the Sistine Chapel. What Charon is holding here is his oar, and he's beating the crap out of the souls getting into his boat to ferry across the river Styx. I wonder if Charon knows who she's a namesake for...