Three Common Names That Were Just Made Up By Authors

Plus, the heartbreaking origin of “Wendy.”

When I was a tweenager, I looked up the origin of my name (not to date myself, but it was probably in a physical book of some kind) and was given a profoundly unsatisfying, unelaborated one-word answer: Jack means “Supplanter.” I’ll note, as a brief aside here, that while most men my age named Jack are secret Johns, I am a pure, unprocessed, unadulterated Jack, just like my impossibly numerous Gen-Alpha brethren, whose mothers are forever shouting after them at the playground and looking at me weird when I turn around expectantly. 

I have since confirmed that this terse, unlikely etymology is actually more-or-less true: Jacks start appearing in the record in the 13th century, and the word “jack” (as I have been hyper-aware for my whole life) has a long, varied, and vibrant history, initially as a generic catch-all meaning something like what we mean when we say “bro” nowadays, as in “jack of all trades,”¹ “every man-jack of them,” and “jack-tar” (sailor-bro, essentially). The idea of “jack” as a generic guy was carried over to describe objects that do generic work, like the “jack” a mechanic might use, and to refer generically to male animals, as in “jackass” and “jackdaw” (donkey-bro and daw-bro, lol). For the same reason, “jack” has a history as a slang term for a penis (this only survives nowadays in the vulgar “jack off”) as well as for toilets (more familiar from every cut-rate fantasy novel you’ve ever read as the archaic “jakes” or — and it’s a relief to see my John-coded compatriots bear some of the brunt of this — the more modern “johns”). 

But the real origin of Jack as a name is from the Middle English jankin (cute!), and (by a completely different route via the Old French) as a nickname for Jacob, which comes to us through the Greek Ἰάκωβος and ultimately the Hebrew Yaʿăqōḇ, meaning (rather surprisingly) “heel-grabber” — Genesis 26 is explicit on this: “After this, his brother came out, with his hand grasping Esau’s heel; so he was named Jacob” — or, less literally, “supplanter” (i.e., someone who takes the place of another as Jacob did to Esau — homeboy never let go of that heel). Which brings us more or less back where we started. 

But and so the point of all this is that “Jack” is a name that sounds (to me at least) like it shouldn’t have a traceable etymology through Old French and Greek and Hebrew even though it does, which got me wondering whether there are common names that sound like they should have ancient origins but don’t. Here are a few rather interesting ones. 

Vanessa

If you look up “Vanessa” in a baby names book, you’ll get the answer that “Vanessa” means “Butterfly,” which is true, but not really. The naturalist Johann Fabricius did give the name Vanessa to a genus of butterfly from the family Nymphalidae (this will become important) in 1808, but the etymologies that cite a Greek origin for the name are highly suspect. 

A much more likely source is the first appearance of “Vanessa” in English, about 90 years earlier, in Jonathan Swift’s poem Cadenus and Vanessa, where the titular Vanessa is referred to as a “nymph” almost a dozen times. Swift had invented the name as a sneaky reference to his lover, Esther Vanhomrigh, by transposing the first syllable of her last name with the first syllable of her first name. Which is all very sweet until you learn that he abandoned her for a second Esther, whom he called “Stella,” another name invented by a poet (its first appearance in English is in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella), albeit with a real Latin root, meaning “star.” 

Imogen

I’ve written about ghost words before — which tend to appear in the language due to a printers’ error of some kind — and Imogen, really a rather lovely name, is a ghost in more ways than one. Her first appearance in English is as the heroine of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, which George Bernard Shaw called “stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order,” something I’m only mentioning because it’s very funny to neg Shakespeare like that. 

Imogen's Bedchamber in Cymbeline's Palace, 'Cymbeline,' Act II, Scene II by Francesco Bartolozzi

The problem is that all evidence points to the fact that Imogen was actually Innogen, after the 12th century Innogen, Queen Consort to Brute the Trojan, which is just such an incredibly metal thing to be called that it almost defies belief. A printers’ error presumably mistook those two “n”s for a single “m,” and Imogen was born. She would later go on to write “Hide and Seek,” which still absolutely owns. 

An interesting coda to this story is that Cymbeline isn’t the first appearance of an Innogen in Shakespeare. Dr. Oliver Tearle points out in a useful explainer that there is a ghost Innogen in Much Ado About Nothing — she was originally Hero’s mother in a stage direction, until an 18th century editor named Lewis Theobald mercilessly excised her from the play:

I have ventured to expunge [this name]; there being no mention of her through the play, no one speech addressed to her, nor one syllable spoken to her. Neither is there any one passage, from which we have any reason to determine that Hero's mother was living. 

Which feels a bit of a harsh punishment for just keeping quiet and minding your own business, but so it goes. 

Wendy

Wendy does occur a scattering of times in English before J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan burst onto the scene in 1904, possibly as a diminutive of the Welsh Gwendolyn or Gwendydd (the element “gwen-” means “white” or “shining,” and can also be seen in Guinevere and, in a roundabout way, Fiona, another name coined by a writer, the Scottish poet William Sharp). 

But there’s no question that the name’s popularity is entirely due to the success of Peter Pan, and Peter Pan’s Wendy is no Gwendolyn: J.M. Barrie named his Wendy in memory of a friend’s young daughter, Margaret Henley, who looked up to Barrie and called him her “friendy,” pronounced as “Fwendy-wendy.” It’s a sweet and heartbreaking story made more so by Barrie’s letter to her father after her death:

“It is very pathetic to me, your visit to that little grave. I shall go there too some day. She flits thro’ the opening of my story, which is now in America.”

Incidentally, Margaret’s father was W. E. Henley, author of the absolutely bangin’ poem Invictus and inspiration (due to his amputated leg) for the character Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Stevenson confessed as much in a letter to his friend: 

“I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in Treasure Island.  Of course, he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you; but the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.”

I didn’t expect to end this on such a tearful note, but Stevenson — who did not have biological children, though he wished to — also consoled his friend in a letter after “Wendy”’s death, writing: 

“There is one thing I always envied you, and that I envy you still.”

1. The much less popular “Tom of all trades” had a bit of a run in the 1600s, but never really caught on.