I blazed the trail for our new American idol
American Idol, Entertainment, Katharine McPhee, Taylor Hicks No Comments »Taylor Armerding
This is a very big week for me. I am finally a winner in the name game.
A guy named Taylor is the new American Idol. A guy named Taylor, just like me. My name is international. It is hot. It is cutting edge. It set 63 million hearts fluttering. Or, maybe it was just a million hearts fluttering enough to set their speed dial 63 times. Whatever. I’m not going to argue. I’m going with the 63 million. It makes me feel better about myself as I bask in the reflected glow of Taylor Hicks, even though he has only a moderately good set of pipes and doesn’t twitch as well as Joe Cocker.
Whatever. He’s an idol. And he and I have so much in common. He’s from the South. I’m from the North. He’s famous. I’m famous, but nobody knows it. He has hair. I don’t. He’s young. I’m not. He’s going to be rich. I wasn’t, am not and won’t be. He gets invited to Leno and the hottest nightclubs. I get invitations to Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and selectmen’s meetings. But hey, we have the same name.
So I’m making the most of the glory. It has been a bumpy road to the top.
See, I was blazing the trail for "Taylor" nearly 30 years before he even showed up in the maternity ward. He owes me. At that time, the only thing a name like Taylor offered was a lot of grief. I guess my parents must have known it had a better future, but I had to go through a lengthy dysfunctional childhood first.
Actually, I’m named after my father. I used to claim that the reason he did that was so that he wouldn’t have to be the only person in the world with three last names. But he never went by Taylor. Our first name is Hudson, which is the one he uses, and which is usually a last name. Our second name was, at the time, almost always a last name. And Armerding couldn’t be anything but a last name.
We moved a lot when I was small. I think I went to four different schools in my first five elementary grades. By the second year, I had the opening day routine down with my new classmates:
"What’s your name?"
"Taylor."
"No, what’s your first name?"
"Well, that’s actually my second name, but I go by my second name because I’m named after my dad, and he uses the first name."
"So Taylah’s (New England pronunciation) not your last name? OK, well, what’s your real first name?" (By this time a small group had usually formed — fascinated at a male creature who wasn’t named Johnny, Bobby, Billy, Andy, Donny, Kenny, Scotty, Ronnie, Terry, Stevie or Davey.)
"Well, my first name is Hudson."
"Hudson? What are you, a car?"
And that, of course, was enough to prompt howls of laughter and derision. Somehow, I still managed to make friends, probably because I ran fast enough to be a good team member in a game of gang-up tag. I recall one of my buddies even suggesting that he didn’t want to embarrass me by calling me Taylor, but since Hudson was too hard a name for him to remember and he could remember I was named after a car, that he was just going to call me Ford.
Taylor was not cool at the time. Just weird.
Time went by, I struggled through middle school, and my name actually became a slight social advantage in high school and college, when it went from weird to interesting, at least to females. There were plenty of girls who wanted to meet a guy with a name more esoteric than Bill. Sustaining their interest was another matter. I think that’s when I took up the guitar, out of desperation.
But over the last 20 years or so, Taylor has faded from being weird to mildly unusual to outright normal. Taylor doesn’t even raise an eyebrow when there are all these guys running around with names like Ashton, Shaquille, Dylan, Finnegan, Gowtheman, Antoine, Keanu, Hamish and Jasper.
And along with that, sometime in the last decade or so came the feminization of Taylor. There seem to be way more girls with that name than boys. So Taylor Hicks gets credit for giving it a bit more masculine visibility again. I predict a little crop of boy babies in the next couple of years — OK, maybe just the next 15 minutes — named Taylor.
See, I blazed the trail; he’s preserving its male identity. We have so much in common.
Taylor Armerding is associate editorial page editor of The Eagle-Tribune. He may be reached at 978-946-2213 or at tarmerding@eagletribune.com.
Source: www.ecnnews.com
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