By any other name would smell as sweet
The Bard was wrong. Even as he wrote these words,
Shakespeare was carving a niche for the names Romeo and Juliette. This should be taken into account by any parent bestowing these personae dramatis upon their children.
One reserves a business’ name by testing
its priority, but to overlook the implication of a name’s storied
history would be to skip the essence of its poetry. The three DeWitt
brothers, Dave, Gene and Burt, all went into their father’s machine tool
business, and DeWitt Brothers Tool Company employed me for 23 years.
Given that origin, DeWitt.com would seem a suitable identity for my
company. However, the URL was long ago claimed by a squatter who set a
high price for the Internet use of my family’s surname. Not
surprisingly, many variations on 3D are also taken in the dot com world.
However, 3DeWitt was unclaimed. Not everyone pronounces DeWitt as we do
with a hard eee, but between the aim of this endeavor in 3D optics and
the family’s name, there was a certain resonance in 3DeWitt.com. We
bought it. I hope you pronounce it as I do.
Name choices have shaped my family. Both my
mother and my father came from families that Americanized their
ancestral surnames, so our family tradition is not so much in the name
as the changing of the name. In marrying Beverly Botto, I proposed by
asking her to name us anew, and she suggested Ditto. It was a brilliant
choice. First of all, neither of us would abandon our individual selves
by way of matrimony. Our new selves were our old selves. We were
identical copies, the Dittos. Secondly, the root from the Latin verb decare is the Italian past participle, ditto,
meaning “having been spoken.” Be it known to all, Mrs. Ditto and I are
spoken for. One wonders, why does the groom bestow the surname anyway?
Marriage is not patrimony; it is matrimony. One would think if anyone,
the bride would provide. So forget all that and invent something new.
The anagram of DeWitt and Botto combined into Ditto was a shuffle that
reflected what we had in mind for our DNA. The little Ditto was born in
1996. He is the sum of our strengths and the difference of our
weaknesses. We didn't name him Romeo.
