Harriet

We have a girl at work who is named Harriet. Seriously, Harriet. I know old fashioned names have made a come back, and some of them work really well, Amy, Emma, Charlotte, Daisy, Lily, even Alice, but Harriet? Seriously? It is a terrible name.

No one is going to revive it, just like Mildred, Ethel, or Gertrude, they are not coming back.

Harriet - the only way Harriet is cool is if you are a jump jet, then it's not quite the same spelling.

Harriet?

It conjures up some single female who never married, who lives with her widowed mother, or alone in a bedsit with a cat, who dresses in clothes buttoned up to her throat, who is deluded by the god con BS because she has nothing else in her life. (like most other people with religion, filling their empty lives with something, you might as well declare Hans Christian Andersen as god)

But I digress...

The Harriet at work has straight lifeless black hair, parted down the middle of her head and brushed behind both ears. Glasses on a hooked nose, a pointy chin, and pearls and twinsets around, and buttoned up to, her neck. And flat shoes and tweed skirts just a fraction too long to be anything but dowdy.

Do you think people grow into their names?

I nearly laughed, laughed undetectably to myself, when I met her. The absolute embodiment of a cliche.

Harriet Dousley, spinster. That's what her business card should read.

You wouldn't say that about a man.

I would.

You wouldn't call a man a spinster.

I might.

You wouldn't talk about a man's appearance.

I do.

You are being sexist.

Is it sexist to talk about a person's appearance just because they are a woman? I don't know. I could just have easily said the same thing about a man, as a woman. But women are so often judged on their appearance and men aren't. Truthfully, I have never met this woman, I have only stumbled across her name and then image on our work directory. It was her name that made me look at her. I thought Harriet? Harriet? You don't often see a Harriet, now do you? And I was expecting a 67 year old secretary, a moment off retirement, not a twenty something lawyer. I was surprised that someone so young would have such an old name. It was what her name conjured up in my mind, more so than anything else.

But, seriously, Harriet? It is a form of child abuse.