Today’s global mononyms are few and include Madonna, Bono, or our own Lorde.
Word of the week – mononymous. I can’t remember where I came across it, but I wrote it down on a notepad on my desk and it’s been staring at me ever since, demanding that I deal with it.
Its derivation is self-evident. Just as anonymous means having no name, so mononymous means having one name and one only. Mononymity is standard among dogs, rare among people and common in religion.
All the early biblical boys and girls (though mainly, it has to be said, boys) were mononyms. Things were just getting going, so there were names enough for everyone to have one to him or herself: Adam, Eve, Noah, Satan and all the merry rest of them.
Most of the biblical mononyms have since become common Christian names, except for God and Satan. Someone should give them a try, perhaps in combination. God Satan-Williams, say, would have been a fitting moniker for many of the kids I taught.
(Not having been raised religiously, I have just looked up Noah to confirm his mononymity and discovered that the old boy lived for 950 years and packed a lot into them. Not only did he and his ark rescue all of creation, but he also cultivated the first vineyard, made the first wine, drank the first bottle and became the first drunk, having fallen asleep “uncovered” in his tent. First but not last.)
Top of the mononymous pops have to be the divine or semi-divine characters – Jesus, Mohammed, and, if you don’t consider the definite article counts as a name, the Buddha.
Their mononymity stresses that they come from no worldly family, that they are uniquely removed from the common ruck, even though they all had parents.
No children, to my knowledge, are ever named after the Buddha, but millions have been named after the other two without mishap. Jesus is especially popular in Spanish-speaking countries. In the winter of 1979-80, the front row of the Zaragoza Veterinaria first (and only) XV consisted of, reading from tight head to loose, Jesus, Angel, Jesus. And though they were all good blokes, you’d have to travel a long way to find three uglier ones.
Just as religions spawned mononyms, so did empires. The Roman Empire gave us Nero, Augustus and Caesar, (though he is often diluted to a dinym), the French Napoleon. Others produced a single name with an epithet attached – Attila the Hun, Alexander the Great, Vlad the Impaler. Whether these count as mononyms or trinyms, I’ll leave to you.
Even in modern times, the wielding of great power, especially for ill, continues to produce the mononyms of notoriety – Hitler, Stalin. It’s as if in their shameless greed and love of power, they have forsaken the gentler nature that a first name suggests. They have become their psychopathy.
The one other main source of mononymity is cultural. The Greek thinkers have come down to us as singletons – Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle. The same is true of artists. Meneer Harmenszoon van Rijn of Leiden in the Dutch Republic will forever be just Rembrandt and his self-portraits as enigmatic as ever.
The little Tuscan town of Vinci near Florence had only the one famous son, and he needs no more of an identifier than the name Leonardo. And the touchy Michelangelo Merisi, who made enemies and died young but painted like an angel, will always be distinguished from his namesake, who also painted like an angel, by being known for the little town he sprang from, Caravaggio.
Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes are all mononyms. Hamlet is Hamlet. Any second name would be as unthinkable as Luigi Othello or Wee Willie Macbeth. And Lear would not be Lear with any prefatory label other than King. Mononymity lends substance.
Today’s global mononyms are few, and they tell of a world in love with amusement. There are footballers: Pele, Maradona, Ronaldo. And there are pop-singers, often self-appointed as mononyms – Madonna, say, or Bono, or our own, Lorde. Are they the Rembrandts of tomorrow? Will their mononymity stay afloat in time’s gutter? I have no opinion on the matter. Mononymous is done.