Do you ever stopped to think about people and their names? It is a really interesting topic to talk about. Well, for starters, everybody's name have a meaning. Sometimes it have more than one meaning, intentional or not, even across several languages. Another thing, most of the names in world have a femininity or masculinity quality associated with them. In another word, there are names that are male-like and there are names that are female-like. They are usually dictated by the society, and most of the time, influenced by the meaning of the names.
What'\ is interesting about this phenomenon is that there is a small number of names in this world that manage to blur the rigid categorization by gender in there respective culture. A name could be accepted as both male or female. One of those names that I know is Hanis. Hanis is an Arabic name which means The Brave One. In my society, the Malaysian, Hanis is generally accepted as both a male and female name. By that characteristic, this kind of name is called unisex name.
However, not all unisex name are clear cut. Within the unisex category, which is the transitory region between male name and female name, there are names that falls on its borderline area or grey areas. In another word, there are names that could be both male and female, but it is more incline to one gender than the other. I have two example I could think of. The first is English/American name, Jordan. Most people would agree that Jordan is a male name. However, I have met a girl named Jordan and knew a couple more Jordan's who are female. Another example would be Aiman, which is Arabic for The Lucky One or The Blessed One. Similarly, most people in my society would agree that Aiman is a male-specific name but I have met a couple of Aiman's in my life who are females.
In the extreme of this phenomenon, there is one weird case. There are names that almost everybody within the society would agree to be gender-specific (and I myself were dead convinced that it was gender-specific) but there is a person of the opposite gender were named after the said name. This extremity caught my attention when I came to know a pretty well-known female figure named Mazlan binti Othman. She is an astrophysicist and the current chairperson for the Malaysian National Planetarium. Mazlan is generally accepted as a male-exclusive name. However in this case, it defy the generally convention. If I yet to know her name, I would never had guess in a million year that her name was Mazlan.
Outside the unisex category, a name is perceive to be either male-exclusive or female-exclusive. This perception is not directly affected by whether or not the meaning is gender-specific. All of the time, a name which posses a genderless meaning could arbitrarily be exclusive to either genders.
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After awhile, I started to think to myself. Wouldn't it be funny if I end up building a marriage with another Syazwi? I mean, imagine how would our wedding invitation would look like. How funny would it be when our children are in schools and their friends or teachers asked them what is their father's name and then proceed to ask what their mother's name is. Haha. I always fantasized about it. I simply think that if it were to happen, it would be awesome. :D
I have to confess. There are times when I go on Facebook and search for a girl named Syazwi, just to see what is the odds of my fantasy becoming a reality. :D
Syazwi Mazli was pondering about unisex names and confessing his weird habit that day.
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