A year ago, my son was born.
We had mostly decided on his name by July of last year, I think, maybe a month and a half before he arrived. The shared note we used to track name ideas was last edited June 11. A wanted him to have a good normal name that people could spell and he wouldn’t have to explain when introducing himself; I always liked that my name was on the unusual side and wanted to give him something like that.
When we couldn’t agree on my wilder name ideas, I realized I also liked names with some lore behind them. We named him Atlas because he can mine history and myth for aspiration, if he wants.
Atlas is a Titan, condemned to hold up the sky1; Atlas is a range of mountains that divide the desert and the ocean; the Atlantic ocean is named after those mountains; an atlas is a collection of maps to make sense of the universe; mythic Atlantis is the “Isle of Atlas”, and Atlas was the name of its first king, according to Plato. Dozens and dozens of things are named after these various atlases: supercomputers, stars, cities, ships. He can pick and choose between legends, make for himself any story he wants.
And people will be able to spell it.
Happy birthday.
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… not the Earth! I think it is a relatively common misremembering that Atlas holds up the world, possibly because the sky was historically depicted as the “celestial sphere”, which looks like the Earth to the modern viewer who doesn’t think of the heavens as spherical. ↩︎