THIS book was originally intended as a guide for bewildered fathers and mothers hunting the perfect name for the world's newest and nicest baby. It was to be a small book entitled: A NAME FOR A CHILD.
It grew, as the baby grew in whose behalf it had been started. That exquisite little girl was one year old, and had been named Ka-tinka Matson, and still my frantic research had not scratched the surface of America's store of baptismal names for boys and girls.
And so this book is no longer solely for those hunting a name for a baby.
This pageantry of names is indeed for questing parents, but it is also for all those interested in the alchemy of sound and the passing parade of human .history.
It is for my fellow writers who are hunting the exact names that will fit the personalities of the heroines and heroes and villains they are plotting to entrap between the pages of best sellers, and for playwrights, who, being also of the hard-working world of make-believers, are fond of names, and for dealers in the fragile stuff of poetry, and for singers of songs.
It is for all those whose minds are curious and who like peering back through the dark, long glass of history, into the secrets of the past four or eight thousand years, in which these names began.
But beyond all others this book is for you, that you may find your name in this pageantry and say proudly: "There is my name, my representative force in the hearing of those who make up my world, my sound effect, my story and my theme song, my personal share in the moving history that has made this land."
For America's name lists have grown with, and are, America.
Our American names have come down to us from sometimes confused and often almost unrecognizable sources. Ancient names that served European countries for thousands of years met with curious changes in the newer United States. As a rule they have dropped syllables and letters and gained in euphony and ease of pronunciation, in keeping with a world less leisurely than the old from whence they came.
