I have been asked many times why I chose the name I did. Well I'm fed up with typing the explanation again and again, so I'm posting it here, so it's there for everyone to see.
Why I am Lucy Amanda Siobhán Anyte Emily Tegea.
Ok. Lucy. My favourite name by far. For multiple reasons. One is our 3.2-million-year-old distant ancestor Lucy (I discounted AL 288-1 as a name. Not catchy enough). The main one though is this; the name represents my rebirth as a woman, the dawn of my new life. Lucy means “Born at dawn”.
Amanda. One of the oldest names in English - even though it’s actually Latin (a feminine gerundive of amare, to love). Amanda first appears in 1212. It’s my second favourite name. The reason I chose Amanda is that after living just about all my life on my own, without really friends very often, and certainly without a partner, with no one to love me at all, I truly felt that as a woman I wanted more than anything to be Amanda, “[she who] deserves to be loved”. Well that one worked 🤣.
Siobhán. Easy one. Pronounced “shu-VAWN”, it’s the Irish Gaelic equivalent of Joan. Now my mother’s sister was Joan, but that’s not the reason. The reason is that I love the name. That’s it. Well, I suppose also that it’s nice to have a name with an accent. That’s a fada, in Gaelic (more formally síneadh fada, pronounced “SHEEN-oo FAH-duh”), the only diacritic mark in Gaelic – though to be fair they make up for that by using a lot of them.
Anyte. After Anyte of Tegea (Ἀνύτη Τεγεᾶτις), an Arcadian poet, born in the mid to late fourth century BCE. She was referred to as “the female Homer”, she was that good, and that famous. She was primarily an epic poet, though she was famous too for her lyric poetry. She was also a great epigrammist, and wrote a huge number. Ever heard of her? No, of course not. None of her poetry survives – nothing, not a trace – and only 24 of her epigrams survive. Why did this happen? How could such a great and famous poet’s work all be lost? Easy. She was only a woman. And so her name lives on in me.
Emily. After Emily Davison (pictured), an English suffragette in the early twentieth century. She died after she stepped onto the track in front of the king’s horse and was hit, at the 1913 Derby. She’s not totally forgotten like Anyte, but like her, her name lives on in me.
And finally, my new surname, Tegea. Well you can work that one out for yourself.
Here’s one of Anyte of Tegea’s epigrams:
“Manes when living was a slave. Dead now, great king Darius, he’s as great as thou.”
So now you know.
