My Name: Andrew / Laurence Payn Barnert

People sometimes ask about my name. Here's the story.

Start with my birth name: Andrew Laurence Barnert. My initials match my father's (Anthony Lewis Barnert). There's a long family history of giving your firstborn your initials and your later kids a different first initial but the same middle initial. Yes, my family have been geeks for generations.

Payn started as a pseudonym. Once upon a time, I was doing publicity for record labels, and also doing music journalism. It doesn't look very good when an article or interview in a magazine is written by a guy who works for the band's label. Someone with more integrity would have avoided writing about bands he worked for, but someone who knows that the music business is the last place to waste your integrity would have come up with a pseudonym. Which is what I did. Because of a long story, I had the email address payn@usc.edu, so I chose Payn. And then one of the labels I worked for started writing me checks under that name, because someone is an idiot. So I had to get it added to my legal name so I could deposit the checks.

It turns out that in California, anyone can change their name just by using it officially for a period of time without any intention of fraud. This is pretty cool in theory. The problem is, it's very hard to use your name officially until it's been changed. In old-fashioned states, you have to go before a judge, and he approves the change; in California, because of our enlightened common-law name change rules, it's very hard to get a judge to see you without a good cause, so you're stuck in a catch 22. Eventually, though, I got a bank to accept my new name.

Anyway, there is no "e" at the end of Payn. Trust me; I made it up, I should know.

The / comes from the same time. I'm a huge fan of the 80s TV show Square Pegs, and it was the nickname of Merritt Buttrick's character, who was a hero ("totally different head... totally"). I decided that since I was changing my name anyway, I should add a / to it. That turned out to be hard to do, as most computer systems beep at you when you enter a non-alphabetic character as part of a name.

So, back to my birth name.

Andrew apparently came from a girl named Andrea. Both versions just mean "man" (in the sense of "male," rather than "homo sapiens"),* so it's a pretty dull name for a boy, and a cruel name for a girl.

I usually go by Andy, or sometimes Andi. This isn't really a matter of choice; I had a friend in college who, as a sort of experiment, tried to get everyone to call me Andrew instead of Andy, and then Drew, but neither caught on with anyone else. Even people who were originally introduced to me as Drew and never heard me called anything else started spontaneously calling me Andy anyway. The same friend later tried spelling my name with an 'i', and that did catch on. I'm not sure what any of that means about me, but there you have it.

I'm not sure where Laurence came from,** but my father was adamant that it's spelled with a 'u' rather than a 'w' to match Laurence Olivier rather than Lawrence Welk. Which is pretty cool.

Barnert is apparently of Plattdeutsch (far northwest German) ancestry, even though it comes from Jews living in eastern Pommerania. I'm sure Hansa traders are somehow involved in that. The "barn" could mean barn, or child, or maybe bear--or something completely different.*** The "-ert" is like English "-er." My guess is that some ancestor brought bear furs from Novgorod or Finland down into Germany, but maybe he was a barn-builder or an early obstetrician. Anyway, it's a pretty uncommon name, so if you recognize it, you probably from a relative of mine (or live near Paterson, NJ).

So now you know.

* "Andrew" is of course also a Biblical name--one of the first disciples, the apostle crucified by illiterate Romans (they made his cross in an X shape instead of a T), and the patron saint of Scotland and Russia. You'd think religious Christians would love him, but it seems less popular among them (except the Scottish) than among the masses. (In fact, it was the most popular name for Jewish boys one year in the early 90s.) So I guess everyone in America has forgotten him.

** The name itself comes from Laurentius, a title for a victor crowned with a laurel wreath; I mean I don't know why I was given it.

*** By the time a Plattdeutsch name goes through eastern Germany and then Ellis Island, who knows what might have happened to it....