Why Is the Name Kevin Funny
Why it'southward hard to be a Kevin in France
Image source, Getty Images
A moving picture star, oui... Only even so a Kevin
What happens when yous have a name that seems perfectly reasonable in your home land, but raises a sympathetic smiling when yous're abroad? BBC Europe Correspondent Kevin Connolly has been finding out the difficult way.
There is a theory called nominative determinism, much love of students of literature and other idlers. It holds that your character will come over time to friction match your proper name.
So if you lot are chosen Max Ability or Chuck Handgrenade and so you are predestined to life equally a human of action - and if you're chosen Ray O'Sunshine or Sunny B Happy and so you volition exist lovability incarnate.
I'd never expected to notice myself touched by the theory personally, being equipped as I am with a wholly unremarkable name. I wasn't even given a centre initial on the utilitarian grounds that they're just useful to professional person cricketers and American politicians.
That all changed when a colleague drew my attending to an article in a French magazine called The Expletive of Kevin.
Its point was that, in the French-speaking world, that Christian proper noun - my Christian name - more or less predestines you lot to being considered an idiot. And not necessarily a particularly lovable idiot either.
Paradigm source, Getty Images
The city of lights. Not of Kevins
My Irish mother would have been mortified to hear this.
To her, Kevin was a respectable saint'south name and added the music of ingemination to the prosaic audio of Connolly.
I've never been entirely persuaded myself - Kevin was a curmudgeonly hermit historic for pushing a adult female who made overtures towards him into a bed of nettles.
If he were alive today I tin't assistance thinking that Kevin would be receiving court-ordered counselling rather than the prayers of the faithful. Simply of course I had no say in the matter.
And the name wasn't ever a curse in the Francophone world either.
When I lived in Paris in the 1990s, I wouldn't say it was enjoying a vogue exactly, but it was experiencing a kind of blip of recognition.
We even settled - in our office at to the lowest degree - on an agreed pronunciation of 1000'veen. It bankrupt the rules of French phonetics a bit - it should surely be Ke-van - simply people had at least heard of the name.
It was never quite clear why it suddenly surged briefly from obscurity, but nosotros know that in 1991 a total of xiv,087 French children were given the name Kevin - and no reason to incertitude it was a winning ticket in the lottery of life.
Nosotros were never certain why. At that place were the Hollywood Kevins of class - Costner, Salary and Spacey - just none of them seemed well-known enough individually to explicate the phenomenon. Possibly, we theorised, when you added them together they accomplished a kind of critical mass - like a glory nuclear reaction.
Image source, Getty Images
We need to talk about Kevins
Rival theorists suggested that the name was copied from members of boy bands, or even, God forbid, from the American film Home Solitary, in which the geeky super-kid at the heart of the story is also called Kevin.
Anyway, our moment in the sun was brief indeed.
The number of new Kevins in France has slowed to a dreary trickle these days, with potential parents frightened off, perhaps, by the trenchant manner in which French sociologists analyse such matters.
Kevin, they say, merely was popular with the lower classes and Kevin was never well-perceived by his betters.
Kevin, in short, is an oik, shown in surveys to take as much equally a 30% lower chance of existence hired when compared with Philippe, or Jean-Luc or Vincent.
Discover out more
- From Our Ain Correspondent has insight and analysis from BBC journalists, correspondents and writers from effectually the earth
- Listen on iPlayer, get the podcast or listen on the BBC World Service or on Radio iv on Thursdays at 11:00 BST and Saturdays at eleven:30 BST
The online discussion that followed the article did not contain, as it might in Uk or America, an angry rejection of this tendency to isolate and marginalise the Kevin, although it did include a handy list of other, as cursed names, including Brian, Brandon, Jessica and Dylan. It didn't discuss whether this varies according to whether you're named after the American vocalizer or the hippy rabbit from the Magic Roundabout.
Anyway, a novel has now been published in French which tells the story of how a young homo improves his chances of beingness accepted into the intellectual salons of Paris by changing his name from Kevin to Alexandre.
I'm not certain my ain disqualification from those salons was ever entirely downward to my name but it all feels like a timely reminder of the exclusion which now appears to be part and parcel of the life of a Kevin in the Francophone world.
I'd like to say that I just don't sympathise it. Merely and then, of grade, that'southward the curse of nominative determinism. Anyone called Kevin is destined to non quite understand annihilation.
Join the conversation - find us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-39278092
0 Response to "Why Is the Name Kevin Funny"
Post a Comment