Why Does This Name Exist?

With a name like Zona Douthit, you can imagine how many times I have been asked, “Where’d you get your name?” as if the speaker were inquiring about a stylish pair of shoes, in an ouch-bet-those-babies-kill-your-feet kind of way. 

This is the last time I’m ever going to tell this story--maybe. I was named after my grandmother, who was born in Wagon Mound, Kansas in the 1880’s. Grandma was named after a woman doctor, I’ve been told. She was her mother’s twelfth or fourteenth child and I was my mother’s fifth and last child; hence, the attraction of the name. Zona says, once and for all, “I’m out of names. Don’t ask me to do this again.”

Douthit is my patronymic. (The dou is pronounced like the first three letters in doubt, and thit like the cry of a lisping person after striking her thumb with a hammer.) The name is most likely from Yorkshire, but my original American progenitor came here in the early 18^th Century from Coleraine, in Northern Ireland, so the name probably got to Ireland on the boot of one of Cromwell’s ambassadors of blood. I didn’t change it when I married because once you get used to a name like Zona Douthit, why start over?

I am naming my blog NaZe ZoNa, which means “Why does this name exit?” in Japanese—sort of.  Stay with me on this while I explain. After I graduated from college, I taught English in Japan. In Japanese, last names come first. So my name was Douthit Zona. But there is no “th” sound in Japanese, so the “th” became a “sh.” Also, Japanese syllables all end in vowels, so they add an “o” to orphan consonants from foreign words. On my business card, my last name came out Doh-shito, which sounded like dogshit-o when I first heard it. Most people called me Zona-san. 

Enter a handsome, clever mathematics professor. He gave me an official signature stamp (those red, round stamps you see on a Japanese wood block print) which read Naze Zona. Here’s where it gets clever. The common Japanese word for “why” is doshite, close enough to dogshit-o, but he found another, ancient word for “why”--naze. Zo means exist, and na is short for “name.” Why does this name exit? Or at least that’s the story he told me. I was pleased with the gift, thereby producing the effect he desired at that moment. (Why didn’t I marry him?)

So, I am going to write about things that make me wonder, “Why are things this way?” You might be surprised or enraged by my ideas, but my goal is to make my readers think. So please, don’t call me names. The one I have is hard enough to deal with. I do invite readers to respond with ideas, but only those grown from the seed of facts and nourished by the compost of logic.

Also, if you have an unusual name and want to vent about it—or know someone named Zona—please let me know. Until next time, sayonara.