A Vulcan named Stork works at the Terran adoption agency. Parents always request that he be the one to deliver their child to them.
It’s years before anyone explains it to him.
People keep gifting him robes with long white birds on them.
The fun thing is he would understand why people were getting him outfits with storks on them. That’s a word, it’s his name, straightforward. All the humans get him the same gag gift, but like, they’re putting effort in at least. This is a genuinely nice outfit. Stork will be a walking zero-effort pun sometimes, rather than waste a perfectly fine robe.
It’s fine. This is a readily comprehensible human illogic. Exactly the kind of thing he expected from moving to Earth.
Six years in he finds out about the stork bringing babies.
Stork has a good long meditation session about this myth, his name, his job, the outfits, the whole shebang (or whatever Vulcan concept is the equivalent).
And he decides he’s honored by it, in a humanly illogical way.
The humans are asking him to do what is after all his job, and specifically requesting him for the joy his name brings them on top of an already agreeable and satisfying task. He has no objection to engendering positive emotions in others. Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so happiness must logically slow it down.
Plus, Vulcans of his generation love puns. There were two decades of punning competitions in colleges across the planet. So when he realizes that he is a walking zero-effort pun, and that the humans also love the pun, he is all for it. He is the Joe Cool of the entire Vulcan population in his city.
And via this pun, the humans are including him in a cherished and traditional myth, by casting him as the literal bringer of life and the expander of families.
There’s no downside. Stork wears his robes, pins, keychains, and other bird-related tchotchkes with genuine pride.
YES IT’S BACK ON MY DASH AT LAST
For real though working together with some human social workers, a Vulcan would be an excellent caretaker for children in an adoption center.
Child has a meltdown? Imagine Stork, perfectly calm and unbothered, approaching the kid and saying “You appear quite upset, Eliza. If you would please allow me to relocate you to the ‘bean-bag-chair,’ we can discuss the source of your distress.”
A Vulcan educated in medicine and child psychology would be endlessly patient with a kid with behavioral issues. Stork wouldn’t get or upset or frustrated. After all, these are children with medical and psychological conditions. It would be illogical to blame the child or to not treat them with the appropriate care.
Even if the a little one was having a bad day or was just overtired, Stork wouldn’t get angry. He might even be a calming presence. Any new kids acting out would learn real quick that they’d have better luck trying to arm-wrestle a Klingon than get a rise out of Stork.
Not only that, Vulcans live much longer than humans. Imagine Stork looking virtually unchanged as decades pass. Kids he’d helped years ago would turn up fully grown, maybe there to adopt their own kids, and run into Stork, looking almost exactly as they remember him.
And he’d probably remember them too. “Welcome back, Eliza.”
“…Harm hastens the heat-death of the universe, Surak teaches, so logically happiness must slow it down…”
One of my favorite realizations from biology is that like… every creature is your relative. You look at your sister or brother or your parents and you think “that’s my family” and you look at uncles and second cousins and distant relations you’ve never met and think “well I don’t know them as well, but we’re all part of the same… clan, you know. They’re my family too”. Surely not everyone thinks this, but some people do. Well anyway, that same thing is true of your dog. The ants crawling on the ground. The birds in the sky. They are, literally, members of your extended family. Not merely as species but as individuals, the way each brother or cousin is an individual member of your family. There is no line between these things. My distant relation, this guy, this bug crawling around. I’m related to him. We’re very different, we’ve lived different lives and are good at different things. But he’s my family.
and im more closely related to raccoons than possums. And more closely related to possums than pigeons. And more closely related to pigeons than wasps. But all of us want my sandwich
This poll is specifically asking about how parents named their children, so even if you have a different chosen name now, answer for your given/birth name. If you’re not comfortable doing so but want to see results, just choose the “not sure” option.
Were you named after someone? If so, which of the following categories does your namesake fall into?
Answer based on the intention when the name was chosen for you, not the actual origin - so for example if your grandmother was named Mary after the biblical figure and you were named Mary in honour of your gran, you’d answer “a relative” instead of “a religious figure”.
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