I met some new friends this weekend…Amy and Jamie. Amy just moved here from Virginia. She is aspiring to be…a singer? an Actress? whatever works.

She was aspiring for a long time to live in LA. Now she is, so she feels like she’s made serious progress.

Her full name is Amanda, but she doesn’t like it. She said that she went by “Amanda” for a brief, weird period in time. Apparently, the guy she was dating knew a different Amy that treated him badly. He didn’t want to call her Amy, too.

That relationship ended.

But Amy was thinking that she might need a new name for her new city.

“What do you think?” she said. “I want something more powerful! Amy is a very passive name.”

Jamie was having nothing to do with this. “Your name is your name. You are who your name is. You can’t just change it!”

Well, that’s not my philosophy at all! Those of you who know me understand that I have unique naming conventions. MURPHY is not my real name…

So I looked at Amy and tried to think of more powerful names. “Rebekah?” I said.

“Hmmm…” was her response.

“Well, let’s see…you want powerful names…maybe a verb.
I have it! ‘Di’ as in Diana! That’s a powerful name!!”

Jamie didn’t think that was funny, but _I_ thought it was hilarious.

This got me thinking about action verb names. Right then, I couldn’t think of any other feminine names that were action verbs. Jamie wasn’t playing, anyway, so I let it drop.

But TODAY!

While setting up a video conference for someone my new conference producer appears on the TV screen and introduces himself, “Hello, This is Neil. I will be your producer today.

“Neil?” I said. “That’s one of those cool action verb names.”

Neil himself was very cool. I told him that there weren’t very many female verb names, and about Amy, nee “Di”.

So we both started thinking of names. I told him they were mostly masculine names. “Like Stu.”

He smiled. “Yeah… And Phil!”

That made me laugh.

But Neil was challenged now. He had to think of girl’s names.

“Carrie!”

“Ooh! good one.”

Neil works in a big conference support pool, so he got the other guys involved in coming up with names. I walk like a wraith from conference room to conference room, so I didn’t have any help. He starts calling out the suggestions:

“Nick!”
“Bob!”
“Chuck!”

“Oh yeah!” I said. “Mark! How could I forget my own brother’s name?”

Things were quiet for a while. We were thinking.

It took us a while, but we came up with these names:
Neil
Carrie
Mary
Stu
Phil
Barry
Nick
Pat
Bob
Mark
Di
Chip
Chuck
Flo
March
Carol
Chase
Mike

And, after some discussion, we included:
Eddie
Peg
Jimmy

We were concerned that Peg and Eddie might be nouns, and Jimmy may be one of those names that became a verb because of the person who first performed that action. “To Jimmy” a lock…It may have become a verb because of the original “Jimmy” who invented that action upon the lock.

ANYWAY.

It was very amusing. And Neil was a great sport.