Celebrity Names

 Celebrity names, and the names of their children, are the front and center of their branding. With crazy names such as “North” or “Kanye West,” celebrity names are meant to often be outlandish, and far beyond what we would encounter in our everyday lives. The Kardashian family has openly discussed their love of the letter “K” and celebrities often change their name when they enter the limelight. For performers alike, they have stage names, to make them more memorable and send a message.

A central theme in the The Importance of Being Earnest is similarly this type of superficiality, with the characters’ hyper focus on external aspects such as names. It seems often ridiculous that Cecily and Gwendolen care so much that the person they are engaged to has the name Ernest, that the play seems unrelatable and completely unconnected to current society. However, this parallel shows that names clearly hold significance today just as they do in the play. While maybe not to this magnitude, we still haven’t moved beyond seeing words as a condensation of one’s identity.

Names are a crucial part of a first impression, one of the first pieces of a person's identity that you get to know. In today’s increasingly fast society, with platforms like TikTok granting almost instant entertainment, these first impressions, and first few seconds, are crucial to being successful in the public eye. However, these fast phenomena don’t always end well.

As Shakespeare pondered names in Romeo and Juliet many years ago, he looked at the importance of names to identity. Romeo and Juliet fell in love in spite of their names, in spite of their identities, but eventually ended in tragedy. They were bound by their family names and historical rivalries. They were only happy before they truly knew each other’s names. While Wilde’s Earnest, takes marriage, love, and names much more lightly, there is a similar thread. Names have strong implications in our everyday lives and the way that we achieve what we want. They are tied to our family and past, but don’t necessarily tell the story of who we are. Whether as hindrances or as supports, names, as external as they are, are meaningful to others. But does that really make it significant, or meaningful to us? The Importance of Being Earnest satirically comments on this, while Romeo and Juliet reveal their viewpoints through a tragedy. If names weren’t as important, how different would everything be? Maybe we should take names more seriously, as “We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”