Hello.  My name is Dina and I am slightly obsessed by names.  Monikers, nick-names, tags and labels and everything in-between.  (To be fair, I am obsessed with words.  I am a word nerd.  But this post is about names, so I shall stick to the subject, like a name sticker to its subject…).  I am not even talking about the sociolinguistic importance of names and how they are perceived, both by ourselves and by others.  It’s too early to delve that deep.  I just like names.

According to my mother, the woman who was there at the time, present and mostly conscious, I did not have a name for several days.  Back in the olden days, when you could smoke in the hospital, you had to wait until your baby was born to figure out what color balloon to festoon the mailbox with.  My parents were so thoroughly convinced I was…