An Irishman's Diary

I CAN understand why Anna and Katie and Alice were all among the top 10 girls' names last year, as recorded by the Irish Timesbirth announcements column (Home News, January 12th). They're tried and true and pleasantly old-fashioned. Conversely, you can also appreciate the vogue for Zoe and Chloe. People just like making that double-vowel sound: I bet Ireland has at least one Zoe Hoey by now.

But how do we account for the popularity of the name Amber, which was apparently joint eighth in the top 10? It can hardly be the success of the Kilkenny hurling team, the most famous local example of the colour. Nor, colour aside, can it be the beauty of the thing itself. Important as amber is in jewellery and the preservation of dead insects, who would consciously name a daughter after a type of fossilised tree resin? Ordinarily, one might instead blame television for the craze. And yet, probably the best-known Amber on TV these days is a character from Hannah Montana. Which is hardly a programme with a high number of expectant mothers among its audience. Or so you would hope.

TV’s alternative role-model – Amber Simpson, Homer’s “other” wife – may be more influential among the Irish baby-bearing demographic. But as you’ll recall from Season 10, the so-named character dates from an episode in which Homer and his born-again-Christian neighbour Ned Flanders visit Las Vegas, where they first get very drunk, and then wake up married to strangers (as can so easily happen in that city).

The scandal is covered up when Amber is later tricked into another wedding, this time with Grampa Simpson, before realising her mistake and fleeing back to a life of substance-abuse in Vegas. None of which, one would think, is a sound basis for calling your daughter after her.

IN FACT, in the US, the name’s popularity has waned greatly since its height, which was in the mid-1980s, when it regularly featured in the top 10 there too. Before that, the curve had been rising since about 1970. And this may explain where its fashion in English-speaking countries originated.

A generation earlier, in 1944 – just as the first of America's "baby-boomers" were about to be born – there was a best-selling US book called Forever Amber, later made into a film. It sounds like a romance novel, and it was: being the story of Amber St Clair, a beautiful orphan in 17th-century England who uses a succession of affairs and marriages to improve her station.

But it was also rather racy for its time. According to The Irish Timesarchive, it made legal history in 1947 when the attorney general of Massachusetts brought a charge of obscenity against it. The innovative thing about the case is that the book itself was prosecuted, not the publishers; although once it had been proven obscene, anybody found selling or lending it could then also be charged.

Surprise, surprise, neither the legal controversy nor condemnation from the Catholic Church had a noticeably detrimental effect on the novel's sales. A bigger challenge was that, at the guts of 1,000 pages, the book was nearly as long as War and Peace. Despite which, it sold millions to the parents of the baby-boomers and, in time, to the boomers themselves.

Although little-read these days, its influence appears to linger in the name’s popularity. But I note with interest our report’s mention that, outside the top 10, the more exotic girls’ names now include “Ebony”. So here is one of my predictions for 2012. “Black” still not being an option, I foresee the birth somewhere in Kilkenny this year of a set of female twins named “Ebony” and “Amber”. You heard it here first.

SPEAKING of predictions, only two months ago in this space we warned of the special dangers posed to scientists by predictive text and spell-checking facilities. One of the examples cited was the name “Higgs boson”, as corrected by certain lecherous phones and laptops. And as if to illustrate the problem, this newspaper’s TV preview last Saturday contained the following: “In 2011, the term ‘Higgs Bosom’ left the exclusive world of science and became part of the common lexicon. In the years ahead, [it] is expected to rewrite our understanding of physics . . .” Yes, the term “Higgs Bosom” is part of the common lexicon, all right. It’s just that you’d like to think your computer was above that sort of thing. Or maybe scientists are themselves to blame for the confusion, because the same preview explained that the epic search for Higgs is only part of a bigger quest, the goal of which is a “Grand Unified Theory” (“GUT” for short). In such circumstances, it may be harsh to blame the spell-checker for assuming the CERN experiment to be a search for body parts.

I'm reminded that James Joyce – who famously gave physics the term "quark" – made human organs one of the many sub-themes of Ulysses. Each of that novel's chapters represents a different area of the body: the heart (paradoxically) in Paddy Dignam's funeral scene; the lungs in the Freeman's Journalnewsroom episode; and so on.

Of course, Joyceans are still combing the text for new layers of meaning. So it would be no surprise if they find the elusive Higgs Bosom in there too, eventually. And when they do, it will probably rewrite our understanding of physics.