Well, the moon does technically have a name: “the moon.” You’re assuming its name is generic for the category. But the moniker is actually exquisitely specific; until Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter four centuries ago, ours was one-of-a-kind. That is, its name became the name of the category and only started to seem like a lame non-name over time: We forgot how very beautiful and wonderful it is.
So in short, your question is based on an ignorant and, frankly, kind of disrespectful misunderstanding. But don’t feel bad! It happens all the time, according to Pamela Redmond Satran, who, with Linda Rosenkrantz, founded Earth’s premier baby-naming website, Nameberry.com, and has authored multiple books on the subject, including The Baby Name Bible and the very avant-garde-sounding Beyond Jennifer & Jason.
When I spoke with Satran, she asked me to consider a baby-name equivalent of “the moon”—a name like John. It has been used so widely, for so long, even spun off into labels for other things, like a toilet, that it has started to feel utterly lackluster and unspecific. “It just becomes a generic word designating a male person,” she said. A guy looking for a prostitute is a john. An anonymous dead guy is John Doe. Often there’s a cyclical nature to this; it takes about a hundred years for those names to get rediscovered and feel fresh again, Satran said. But, then again, recent generations of parents seem to be getting more and more intolerant of that sort of ordinariness.
It feels like there’s more riding on a name now. Just look around, Satran said. “We’re a name-happy culture!” Every zoo in America seems to be holding a contest to name its new baby giraffe, she told me. Weather services are naming every conceivable kind of storm. Meanwhile, we are reaching deeper for unique names to give those things—often into esoteric, overlooked storehouses of names. A prominent source right now happens to be astronomy.
All of a sudden, Satran said, names like Andromeda and Cassiopeia are flaring up on her radar. Venus Williams has made the name Venus “feel more possible now.” Erykah Badu has a kid named Mars. Actor Chris Noth named his kid Orion. An hour after we got off the phone, Satran sent me a news story about people in Russia naming their children Moon.
So what Satran helped me understand is that your superficial dissatisfaction with our moon’s name, and your yearning for something more expressive, is totally hip and zeitgeisty. Wanting to rebrand our moon is as thoroughly modern a preoccupation as bone broth. The only way forward, it seems, would be to call the moon Grayson or Tate or Hermione or Richard, then rename it again a hundred years from now when someone feels that name’s too boring and raises the issue again. As for me, I find something wonderfully reassuring about the moon just being the moon while our opinions of it, down here, wax and wane.
