What’s in a name?

Someone, I think it was Martin Amis, once said that you can judge a novelist by how much effort he puts into his characters’ names. If that’s true, a political independent who grew up in the 1990s with the name “Matt Purple” may be a sign of some cosmic writerly laziness.

Yes, that is my real name. The one you see in the byline there. I’m always amazed at how many people assume it’s a nom de plume, as though if I could have any last name I wanted I’d choose an Easter color. I actually did write an essay under a pseudonym once: “Matt Thomas,” Thomas being my middle name. Given that it was instantly posted to the top of a prominent website and discussed on a national radio show, I sometimes wonder whether I’m the victim of nomenclature discrimination.

Yet even if I am, I would never do it again. There is something in a name, something immutable, something that cuts to the core of your identity. And if you grow up with a goofy last name like mine, it can’t help but imprint itself on your personality. You can’t spend an entire week at summer camp being called “Purple Nurple,” have a high school teacher who liked to roar your name across the classroom and get defensive every time it comes up. You have to accept it and learn to self-deprecate.

I’m always amazed by how many people think they can come up with a wildly creative nickname that I’ve never heard before. I’ll still on occasion get someone who will hear my name for the first time, smile as though he’s just invented nuclear fusion in his head, and exclaim “Purple People Eater!” or “Purple Prose!” It’s as though, after living with this name for thirty-five years, I’ll suddenly fly backward like a rag doll and scream “MY GOD THAT’S BRILLIANT!” Sorry, guys, but I’ve heard them all. Purple Rain. Purple Haze. There are no surprises left.

You would think with a name like Matt Purple I would have been bullied growing up, but there was actually very little of that. I remember one particularly boring girl in high school who seemed to think if she said my name over and over again like an incantation she could conjure up laughs or perhaps a friend. But otherwise my schoolmates were pretty relaxed about it. It helped that Purple was usually only the second most hilarious name in any given group. My heart goes out to all the Dick Cummingses and Marshall Hookers out there, who absorbed abuse for me like a human shield.

Names like those make you wonder whether some parents are just sadistic. So it is that, while I love the name Patrick, my wife and I could never consign our son to a lifetime sentence of being called “Pat Purple.” (By the way, if you want to know whether your spouse really loves you, just ask whether she’d change her last name to “Purple.” Thanks honey!) Yet if I feel a responsibility to my son, so too to my father, who surely endured many of the same colorphobic slings and arrows that I did without ever losing his pride. Who was I, the only boy in our family, to break the chain over a few “Matt Mauve” jokes?

The Purples of yore, as best we can trace it, originated in the English county of Essex, in a small village called Bardfield Saling, where I’m reliably informed there are several Purples buried in a cemetery. They came to America early, landing in East Haddam, Connecticut, during the 1670s, upon which they quickly made their way up to western Massachusetts near the Vermont border whose land they farmed for centuries to come. My grandfather worked as an electrician in the town of Greenfield, and he named his business the Purple Electric Company. You don’t need to ask what color he painted the trucks that he ran up and down Federal Street.

Some punch there, some humor, and again who was I to break with it? We live in a time that seems determined to abolish the past, to shrug off tradition like it’s an itchy coat. Amid all this, clinging to your name can feel like an act of rebellion, a link to your ancestors who might not have been Twitter activists yet still somehow managed to win World War Two. This is all the more important given what an uprooted people we’ve become. There are no Purples in my direct line left in northwestern Massachusetts. My generation, like me, has mostly left New England altogether.

Yet by keeping my name, I still feel linked to that place, that lineage, even if my own life doesn’t involve soil-tilling or electrical wiring. It also ties me to the Purple diaspora, the many disparate Purples who have flung themselves across this great country. At least some of them went west with the Gold Rush, and one of them, Edwin Ruthven Purple, who ended up in Montana during the 1860s, had his notes published in a book called Perilous Passage. It’s all very exciting until you read the introduction: “The account is valuable not because the author was a person of great charisma, remarkable abilities, or stunning insights. In professional achievement, business acumen, intuitive shrewdness, or even flair for literary expression, Ed Purple lacked any truly distinctive talents.”

Hopefully genetics is overrated. Yet my own literary limitations aside, at least I can say that most everyone seems to appreciate Purple these days, including me. You’d be surprised what a good name can end up meaning to you.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2023 World edition.