Problems with names

By Ambeth Ocampo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:38:00 10/29/2008
Most Read
There is a website that deals with names. My name generated this useless information: First, “42% of the letters are vowels. Of one million first and last names we looked at, 22.8% have a higher vowel makeup. This means you are well envoweled.” Second, “In ASCII binary it is... 01000001 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110100 01101000 00100000 01001111 01100011 01100001 01101101 01110000 01101111.” Third, “Backwards, it is Htebma Opmaco.” Fourth, “in Pig Latin, it is Ambethway Ocampoway.” Fifth, “People with this first name are probably: Male or female...We don’t know yet. We’re working on it!” Sixth, there was nothing on word or name origins. Seventh, my personal power animal is a “Giant Weta” (whatever that is). Eighth, “Your ‘Numerology’ number is 4. If it wasn’t bulls**t, it would mean that you are practical, tenacious, traditional, and serious. You are well organised and have a strong work ethic.” Ninth, “According to the US Census Bureau, fewer than 0.001% of US residents have the first name ‘Ambeth’ and 0.0072% have the surname ‘Ocampo’. The US has around 300 million residents, so we guesstimate there is only 1 American who goes by the name Ambeth Ocampo.”

Further surfing revealed that: I share the name “Ambeth” with an Indian Member of Parliament, Shri Ambeth Rajan. There is an Ambeth Street in Farmington, Michigan, USA. There is a tour guide in Intramuros who doesn’t know me or my work and probably copied his spiel from Carlos Celdran. There are a number of Filipinos, both male and female, with the same nickname, and on YouTube there is a plump woman in shorts named “Ambeth” who dances seductively. (You can spend hours on the Net on sites infinitely more engaging than porn.)

After four columns on names, naming, and pseudonyms in Philippine life, this will be the last for a while.

Today I share an email response. From Rudy Coronel: “Indeed, ‘Names can be fun’ (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 10/24/08)! Your column suddenly resurrects this once-upon-a-time related experience of mine. It was our town fiesta, and there was to be a Mass baptism in our parish. My first-born, Rubelyn (I coined it from my and my wife Belen’s names) was among the ‘newborns’ awaiting the occasion. Inside the church, the priest first assembled us—parents, children and sponsors—side by side into a semi-circle, then one by one asked each child’s name prior to conducting the simultaneous ritual. On hearing my daughter’s name, the Among remarked with unconcealed insult: ‘Oh, you people are really fond of unChristian names. Call her Maria Rubelyn!’ We meekly said, ‘Amen!’ When the father next to me was asked his child’s name, his immediate reply was: ‘Tigre po, Padre!’ [‘Tiger, Father!] That all the more provoked the clergyman’s temper, as he retorted: ‘Bakit, hayop ba yang anak mo?’ [‘Why, is your child an animal?’] To which the unperturbed father answered: ‘Gusto ko lang pong lumaki siyang matapang, Padre! Paris din marahil noong isang ama na nauna ninyong tinanong at sa naging tugong Leon po, Padre, ay ‘di kumibo. [‘I want him to grow up brave, Father! It’s like the way the father you asked and you said nothing when he replied, Leon, Father.’]

“Well, whatever else happened next in the church is beside the point. The point is, what can you say about such commonplace stupidity of some priests as I have related? I couldn’t care less about the Tigre or Leon thing! The sad thing is many, many years thereafter, my daughter, who had since adopted Maria Rubelyn in all the schools she attended, was denied a passport when she applied for one, because the name in her original birth registration was only Rubelyn. In hindsight, I should have probably gone back to the civil registrar after my daughter’s baptism to have her registered name amended to include the additional name given by the priest. But could the civil registrar, in those days, just do that without a court order? Besides, to be honest, which father could be so intelligent and exceptionally farsighted as to have thought of that, if he were in my shoes.

“At any rate, thanks to a so-called Angara Law (I haven’t yet read it), my daughter’s problem was solved. According to a lawyer-friend of mine, that law allows simple changes in one’s name in the Civil Register without court action. But here’s the rub! In our midst and times, when everybody wants to go abroad and direly needs a passport, and given the countless other people who had once been a ‘victim’ of the Church in the same way I was, it is unfortunate that most civil registrars have been making a killing out of the situation by charging exorbitantly prohibitive fees for quite a very simple clerical process. Maybe, the true objective of the law along this light needs to be revisited.”

Frankly, I am seriously considering going to court to change my awful baptismal name (it’s not Ambrosio) into my professional name. I wouldn’t be surprised if my NSO certificate will yield another name. My mother was close to 70 when she had to get an NSO certificate for a passport application. All her life she was known as “Belen” but her civil registry read “Valeriano.” If you think getting a man’s name was bad enough, Valeriana was the name of her wicked stepmother! My mother assumed that when the priest or civil registrar asked for the name of the child, the stepmom, who was hard of hearing, gave her own name. Then, the clerk, also hard of hearing or stupid, or both wrote down “Valeriano.” I know of similar cases but will not mention them here to protect the innocent.

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu.