What Kind of Name is Regina George?

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I was thinking about doing a blog post on naming characters, and in said post, I was going to discuss how important it is to choose suitable character names that don’t date the writer. Like, for example, if you’re writing a contemporary teen fiction, you probably don’t want to have characters named Debbie, Cindy, or Judy, because when is the last time you met a girl in this generation with one of those names? They’ve just fallen out of fashion. I started teaching in the early 90s, and of all the students I’ve ever taught (and as Billy Collins pointed out in one of his poems I love, there have been enough to populate a small town), I don’t recall ever teaching a Debbie, Cindy, or Judy.  (Lots of Madisons, Taylors, Jordans, and Morgans, though.)

But when I started thinking of this blog post, it occurred to me that one of the most successful teen girl movies ever has an anachronistic main character name: Regina George in Mean Girls. Regina? Really? Does she hang around with Deloris and Betty? Teen girls today just aren’t typically Reginas. So why Regina when that name is so dated?

I looked it up. Tina Fey chose that name because Regina means “queen” in Romanian, Italian, and Latin.

Of course it does. And this is but one reason why Tina Fey is Tina Fey and I’m not.

But for those of you out there who, like me, are not Tina Fey, you might want to think about some good sources for character names. A current school yearbook (not yours from the 80s where everyone was Michelle or Stacy, mind you) or a teen magazine with letters from readers can both be good sources of contemporary names.

I also sometimes like to use names of people I know in my books. My villain in Brand-New Emily is named after a former colleague of mine because hey, her name is Heatherly, and even though the real Heatherly is really nice, what kind of writer would I be if I let a perfect name like that go to waste? It just screams POPULAR GIRL. My main character in Jump is Brinkley. I don’t know a Brinkley in real life, but someone had told me there was a Brinkley in my hometown and suggested it as a character name. I liked it, so I used it. (A couple of weeks ago, I met a nurse who’d named her daughter after the very same Brinkley, so the real, original Brinkley now has two namesakes at least.) The main character in my upcoming novel is named for a British doctor I’ve never met but who married the brother of a close friend of mine from high school about twenty years ago. When my friend told me her soon-to-be-sister-in-law’s name, I thought it was so cool that I knew I’d have to steal it some day, and I finally have.

Yes, I think it’s perfectly fine to steal names. As TS Eliot is rumored to have said (he didn’t exactly, but I still like the quote), good poets borrow and great poets steal. I think that somehow gives fiction writers a pass to nab a good name. And if your friends are cool, they won’t mind and might even like it. Heatherly, for one, thinks it’s a hoot to have a fictional diva share her name. I’m so glad, because I just don’t think a Judy could’ve possibly wielded the same power as a Heatherly.