name-giver

Indeed, some women with a xilungu puberty namelike the few, mentioned above, who were named at birth by a manexpressed a similar passivity in their accounts, whether by saying "I was named" instead of "I named myself" or by foregrounding the role of the name-giver (usually their father or an elder sister, a school teacher, or a missionary) in their narrative of how they acquired this name.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

In the first case, a baby girl might be named after the name-giver, most often the midwife positioned between the mother's legs who delivered the infant and bathed her for the first time.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Misse Xivuri, for instance, was given the name "Vavulayena" "they say her" at birth, because the name-giver believed she was blamed for everything that went wrong in her husband's homestead:

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

Or, as in Juliana's case, the name-giver might choose a word or phrase reflecting what she considered the most salient characteristic of her life at the time of the child's birth.

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

These thematic nameslike those of the older women for whom an infant might be namedwere not gender-specific, and often commemorated oppressive material circumstances or sources of interpersonal conflict, especially between the name-giver and her affines:

Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique 2005

This process, as we affirm, the name-giver named inspiration and expiration.

Timaeus 2006

I mean, your name is a really big F-ing deal and I don't want to be blamed for being a shitty name-giver by my snot-nosed unborn kids.

partygirl Diary Entry partygirl 2000

For the name-giver was a great enemy to stagnation of all sorts, and hence he gave the name aeischoroun to that which hindered the flux (aei ischon roun), and that is now beaten together into aischron.

The CRATYLUS Plato 1975

I imagine, Socrates, that he must be the namer, or name-giver, of whom we are in search.

The CRATYLUS Plato 1975

The underlying as - sumption is that names were consciously invented by an original name-giver, who may well have had more than one reason for a certain choice.

STUDY OF LANGUAGE ALVAR ELLEG 1968