Could a couple of well-paired names be the glue that holds a family unit together as in preventing a routine roll call from becoming a mini-crisis?
However, for mother of triplets Artisha Davis in New Orleans, the secret to naming the babies has been finding a middle ground between the two approaches, a mix of similar-sounding words and intentional patterns of meaning. One evening in 2024, Artisha came across the name “Daviane” while browsing the social media platform Instagram, and to her, the name means “beloved.” However, she opted to keep the meaning while altering the way the words were spelled to come up with three names for her babies, Davianna, Davian,and Daviane. The triplets are 13 months old.
She finds it funny now because literally, she has to.“Everybody mixes them up. Even I mix up their names sometimes. I have to look and say, ‘Which kid is which?” The names Fat Mama, Little Mama, and Little Man were what they were referred to in NICU. These names were much more descriptive than any other name they could have been given.
It was not an option but reality in which she lived. Davis also has a twin sister, and her name is almost similar to that of Davis, with only one letter different. Such an aspect has also been seen in her life, not only through stories but through real-life situations, such as mixing medicines and issuing an incorrect parking ticket to another person, which was meant to be a bond but became an issue to share. The impact of having a different name than her twin sister has also been felt through how Davis understands the concept of a bond.
This is the source of similarities in the names of brothers and sisters. For example, in the Korean culture, there is a common syllable in brothers and sisters and their cousins, which is their symbol of unity. In other cultures, their children are linked through their meanings, for example, in order to connect with their grandparents, saints, or people who are not alive, thereby becoming the caption of their family album.
Of course, there’s a scientific reason for Davis’s ability, and countless parents before him, to look at the kid straight in the eye and call him or her by the wrong name. This is because cognitive science has discovered the reason for people’s propensity for misnaming others, switching names back and forth between people who have similar relations in life, especially when those names sound similar.
A team of researchers at Duke University studied the phenomenon of misnaming in some detail, terming it a predictable error when they wrote, The incorrect name is often retrieved from the same ‘folder,’ i.e., friends for friends, family for family, and phonetic similarity between names helps fuel mix-ups. Their survey of over 1,700 people showed 95% of respondents had been referred to by the wrong name by a family member, a rather unglamorous finding. Nothing to do, of course, except add stress or have the audacity to multi-task, because the brain favors fast retrieval over selection. So, muddle can coexist with love, lack of intimacy through neglect. Davis continues this tradition of naming children in the arrival of the fourth child this past fall.
I chose ‘Devyn,” which was a softer version, but the same sound and beat, Davis said. I didn’t want her to look like she was a world away from the rest of the kids. A stranger might remember the names and look back on the misunderstandings of a lifetime. Davis hears what amounts to the same message being deliberately repeated: loved, one woven into the fabric of the family.
