Joanna: The Best Worst Name in the World!

I loooooove names, of any and all types. I like finding out where they come from and what they mean-- the more unusual the better. First names, last names, doesn't matter. I've been through them all.

In fact, I don't know if she knows it but one of the meanings of a friend of mine's name is "Goat." Not kidding. (No, Gayle, it's not you.)

"Goat", I figure, kind of negates any of the good qualities this particular name has. Kind of like when Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise named their baby Suri-- a very pretty name with several pretty meanings in different languages, including "Princess", "Queen", and "Rose". In other languages, though, it means "Pickpocket", "Pointy nose", and "Llama." (See?) Llama's not as bad as Goat, but "Pickpocket" is pretty harsh. And that's not even an obscure language, Pickpocket, it's in Japanese. Not exactly Sorbian, is it?

But "Joanna" is different from Suri and The-Name-That-Will-Not-Be-Named-But-Means-Goat, if only because of its sordid modern history. Joanna has been the go-to name for troubled and trouble-causing female characters in books, movies, and TV in a way no other name has formillennia. No, really. You may not realize it but you've been conditioned to associate the name "Joanna" with annoying, immoral, and evil women.

I know I'm biased, and more likely to remember uses of my own name. Maybe, hopefully, at the end of this I'll get comments from Natashas or...I really can't come up with any other female antagonists that share a name. And, really, to be honest, I can only come up with two characters named Natasha. Neither are paradigms of morality and sense or manners...but 2.

Joanna is the English spelling for the feminine of John and Hebrew for "God is Gracious". Anna, Hannah, Janet, Jane-- they're all derived from Joanna. That being said, it's not, as modern trends would make you think, a combination of the names "Jo" and "Anna"-- it was a single unit before those were taken from it. Its first recorded use was in the New Testament and it was downhill from there:

Joanna was one of Mary Magdalene's reformed prostitute friends. She was one of the three women that went to Jesus' tomb to anoint his body and found it empty after He had ascended to Heaven. This is pretty cool, but if Mary Mags is still called a hooker, so's Joanna.

Joanna was the ugly, armless and legless doll that nobody wanted until Beth took pity on her in Little Women.

Joanna is the name of a girl in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith) that has a baby out of wedlock, causing a scandal in the neighborhood that eventually leads to the other women in the neighborhood stoning her.

A former Queen of Spain, Juana, the mother of Charles the First was apparently off her rocker and, in English, has gone down in history as "Joanna the Mad".

The wealthy bitchass Goldie Hawn plays in Overboard is named Joanna before Kurt Russell rechristens her "Annie" when he kidnaps her amnesiac self.

Joanna is Jennifer Aniston's character in Office Space, and though the character is generally okay I don't like Jennifer Aniston, so it counts.

A minor character that brought me no end of grief in elementary school: Joanna, the pet goanna lizard (think small komodo dragon if you're too lazy to click the link) of the main villain in The Rescuers Down Under. I was often told "These are not Joanna eggs!" I don't know why several teachers showed us that movie, but they did. It was also played a lot when the weather was too bad for us to go outside during recess.

I can't think of any others, but you see my point. The trouble with my name is more than just never being able to find my name on personalized tchotchkes, or people managing to pronounce it wrong somehow (my favorite so far is "Joan-a"), it's the negativity associated with it from all these characters. The best I've got are the 1.5 Joannas in Love Actually: Sam's beloved dead mother and the classmate he's got a crush on, the coolest girl in school. I count 1.5 because Sam's mother never gets to talk...she's just dead.

I love my name. I just wish it had a better reputation.

The Name of a Hero

Arthur, Janet, and Sean are coming up from Maryland, 3 hours away, for Manny's birthday party tomorrow, so I won't be doing tomorrow's Saturday Summary, but I'll make up for it with a Super Sunday Summary, and it will be chock full of random. Chock full. 


It's funny, 9 times out of 10 I post these things the day I write them, and I usually start just by rambling and then either the topic comes out of that or, more commonly, a topic comes out of thin air and I have to delete my rambling and post the real story. That's what happened today. I started out rambling, but then a phone call from my mother's sister lead to the perfect story. 


How I got my name. 


Late at night, 25 years ago yesterday (I would have posted this yesterday, but I always thought it was the 18th or 19th for some reason) there was a fire in a bar.  I don't know exactly why the two firemen entered the blaze-- if they were looking for anyone trapped or if they knew that there was someone there or what, but after finding a man or the man they tried to escape, but what they thought was the exit was actually the door to a stairwell and all three men died. One of the firemen was my parents' best friend, Joseph. There was a memorial yesterday and it made the front page of today's local newspaper here, on The Times of Trenton website. The whole article isn't available though, which is a shame, as I'm sure it contains details of that night that I was never told, for obvious reasons. 


Good came from this, though, as now it's a law in New Jersey that businesses must submit floor plans to the responding firehouses to avoid another tragedy like this one. And Joseph's parents became my "grandparents" in a way that my biological grandparents never did. My first daughter's name will be Genevieve, after Joseph's mother, regardless of my husband's opinion, haha. 


I have a deep love and respect for those that willingly risk their lives to save others. Firemen, police, military-- honoring their bravery is ingrained in me, and in the very letters of my name. 


And another good thing that came from this is that my parents didn't name me Sandra. "Plum Sandy" doesn't have the same ring as "Plum Jo."