On the topic of naming: I have always been fascinated in naming devices. How could my parents know by looking at this bit of humanity that Pat would work perfectly? Not Patty...Not Trish...not Trisha...definitely not Patricia...How could they know that it would take me years to learn how to spell Patricia?
The simplest answer would be that they didn't know, that they were honouring my grandfather, Patrick Philip...in those days no one could predict the gender!
But Pat it is and Pat is who I am.
The other night in a group someone referred to me as Mach...and that horrified someone at the table, "Your students called you Mach?"
Actually one of my students explained that they called me Machin because that was the fastest way to get my attention. By the time they called me Miss Machin, my attention was elsewhere. He defined my attention span as that of a a fly with a lobotomy...I loved that definition!
But I think in fact that the origin lay elsewhere. Until recently there has been a stigma attached to a woman of a certain age who is not married. If one were not married by twenty something, one was abnormal.
After the age of thirty, one was considered a spinster...and spinster teachers were always called...Miss Machin. I like to think that my students and the other teachers could not get their minds around the fact that I fit the stereotype of the spinster teacher. And so they compromised...they called me Machin.
As I write I realize that that is fading. I am more and more Pat now...the transition was so subtle that I didn't notice...but even my friends are calling me Pat!
And I can't resist mentioning Miss Craze. She was definitely not the stereotype of a spinster. She was cool and elegant and she climbed mountains in Nepal. But she could never be called Craze...for obvious reasons.