There's More Meaning Than One Might Think

That's a panel from the second issue of the current volume of Birds of Prey. It's fortunate it was posted as part of the 4thletter's This Week in Panels a while back, or I'd have never seen it. Thanks to Gavok for posting it.

Swierczynski used a similar line when he was writing Immortal Iron Fist, during the "Escape from the Eighth City" arc. While imprisoned, Danny starts up a conversation with the prisoner in the next cell, who asks him what his name means. Danny pauses for a moment, and thinks of a line he attributes to Tarantino (I think): 'We're Americans, our names don't mean anything.'

Danny ends up telling the man he was 'named for his father'.

I guess I'm partly amused Swierczynski went with a similar line, albeit changed enough so it fit the situation, but I do like the line in general. It feels accurate, the idea that Americans appropriate things from other cultures, but frequently don't know or care about the history behind it. When I was in junior high, one of my social studies textbooks had this bit at the end of a chapter. It was a story about a family that gets together on the 4th of July, and some of the relatives (in-laws, I guess) are British. The way it plays out, the father/husband tries to boast about all these great things that are American, and the British in-law calmly points out all those things (like hot dogs) originated somewhere else. I don't remember whether the point was to emphasize the "melting pot" idea, or to try and temper potential jingoism by reminding students a lot of the things we love weren't actually devised by Americans. But we forget that. Or ignore it.

I don't necessarily mean it as a negative, since it could relate to the sort of thing Garth Ennis had Tommy Monaghan tell Superman. That it doesn't matter where one came from originally, they're here now, they're Americans. There's the risk that comes with ignoring history, and thus repeating it, but the idea of setting aside the past and everyone simply sharing what they bring to the table is kind of nice, if ridiculously naive.

Maybe none of that has anything to do with why I or Danny Rand don't worry about where our names came from, or why Starling has the tattoos she does (though it may turn out she has a reason for those particular designs). For me, my name is something that was given to me, and its origins are purely academic. Whatever it meant before, it's my name now. Does that make it a shorthand method of describing me? You say my name to someone who knows me, and certain descriptors or images come to mind**. There's a self-centeredness to that, obviously, but my feeling is there are a lot things involved in my being the person I am, but the origin of my name isn't one of them.

Alex has a lot of tattoos. A person who didn't know him might look at all of them and come to the same conclusion Katana did, they don't mean anything. True, some of them weren't chosen for any reason other than they looked cool. Some were picked by Alex with a specific reason in mind. Whether the meaning he derives from them is the same as that which the originator intended I don't know, but for Alex they do mean something, even if the rest of us can't recognize it.

* The St. Louis Cardinals acquired a pitcher this year named Mark Rzepczynski. His nickname, appropriately, is Scrabble. I propose we assign that nickname to Swierczynski as well, because Scrabble is much easier to spell.

** To use a different example, I don't know what "Benito" or "Mussolini" mean, but if I read them together in a sentence, certain things are going to come to mind. Mostly him standing on a balcony, arms crossed, nodding his head vigorously, or trying futilely to get the rest of Europe to agree to limits on the size of their militaries so his could avoid falling behind.