Female Halfling Virtue Names

The idea of halfling virtue names in gaming has been buzzing around in my head for a few months. Those who've gamed with me in the past are familiar with my preference for using virtue names for my human characters, in part because every journey, especially for those terribly religious characters like paladins, resembles the subtext in so many Greek Dramas-the real meaning of one's name.

The last one I named with a virtue name was sort of a joke... When going over my out-of-use characters, I found a preponderance of Doctor Who related names, Zoe, Jamie, Tegan and a Rose. Now, these were actually unrelated to Doctor Who on my part (indeed, my Tegan is a Teagan, given the patronymic of Teague the Harper, the NPC bard who was her dad) and my Rose was last played in 1995 or so, but since I've been watching Who from the beginning this past year it became a joke that all my characters shall names relating to Doctor Who, even if the writers of Doctor Who will have to write in my characters AFTER they go to the dead pile... Anyways, so when making a character who was deeply religious (albeit not in a Paladin way!) it was inevitable that she'd be Verity...

Virtue names for human characters are pretty easy, especially for female characters, because in most cultures in our history males are often named for heros or famous figures (in English, for example, Biblical names like James and Simon, and historic names like Alexander and Julian) and females are often named either after their fathers or after virtues, generally the virtues that make them a good wife. That's why virtue names often seem old fashioned to us: Hope and Faith aren't that out there, but Patience, Chastity and Fidelity sound like some women out of The Crucible.

If we look at Tolkien's names for Hobbits, most of them lovingly included on this list, you'll find that most of the masculine names are nonsense in English, but that there are a great many female names that have simple meanings in English: Flowers, Plants and objects of value.

So what if these are virtue names after all? What if we assume the halfling tongue to be symbolic, so symbolic, in fact, that few Bigguns speak it because they don't share the entire mythic history of halfling kind and don't know what they 'really mean'? [scroll way down for Table]

Name*:	Real World Meaning/Derivation:	Halfling Virtue:
Amaranth	A category of plants, some weeds with many uses	Adaptability
Angelica	Group of plants used in medicine & flavoring	Flavorfulness**
Asphodel	Plants, let's assume the British Bog Asphodel	Hard to Kill
Belladonna	Plants, poisonous, useful as anesthetic...	Pretty & Deadly
Berylla	From Beryl, a gem w/many colors, Mohs 8	Changeable & Strong
Camellia	Camilla, Genus of plants that includes Tea	Vital for EVERYTHING
Daisy	Flowers that close at night and open in day	Dependable
Diamond	Hardest gemstone	Hardy.
Lily	Perennial flowers that grow from bulbs	Always Returning
Lobelia	Plants that induce vomiting.	Remover of Poisons
Malva	Edible Plants w/weedlike growth	Comforter
Marigold	Plant that has insecticide properties	Wyrm (Dragon)Slayer
Mentha	The Mints, impossible to kill in the garden	immortal
Mimosa	A variety of plants including plants that react to touch	Speedy
Myrtle	Hard to kill plant used in making liquors	Giver of Health
Peony	Flowering Shrub, often up to 5-6ft tall	Tall
Poppy	Flowers, source of opium	Ender of Pain
Rosa/Rose	The Rose family, brambles	Sneaky and protective
Rowan	Tree with astringent berries	Preserver

oh, and this name generator is the best: http://www.slacknhash.net/halfling_name_generator.php
*From Tolkien
**Might be one of the most important Halfling Virtues of all!

How I got to my thirties, with a degree in psychology, with a focus on Neuroscience, without knowing *this* was synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a condition where when one sense is activated another sense is triggered along with it. When I studied psychology and neuro (as a dual major in Biology and Psychology,) I learned all about it, without ever realizing I was a synesthete.

My first real experience that something was different for me was in drama camp as a kid. Some new age hippy dippy people came in for a lecture, and one of the exercises was to close your eyes as one of them struck a chime, and describe what you 'felt,' or 'saw,' and for how long.

I closed my eyes, and put my head down, and put my cupped hands over my eyes, because the lights through my eyelids made everything sort of pink, until I got to a deep reddish-black. They struck the chime, and the sound of the wood on the chime made a white flash, followed by a deep blue that started as a small circle in the center of my field of vision and grew, to the point where it was a blue so very deep and intense that it was slightly painful. When the blue reached the edges of my field of vision it broke into white stars, sort of like when the Enterprise is moving through space. They all faded, slowly, towards the bottom of my field of vision, dripping to the bottom and slowly fading to black.

People started "describing" their feelings before the blue was gone. I've been tested by a buttload of hearing and sensitivity experts, and we know I hear high and low pitches at the far end of normal human hearing, and I'd already had enough hearing tests to understand why the kids thought the thing was completed, and when the guest speaker put her hand on the chime and stopped it I figured it was for she and I, who could still hear it.

So, being typical method actors to be, the kids described the feelings the chime put in them. It got around to me, and I described the images I had, whereupon everyone looked at me like a freak...they were purely visual, and I assumed everyone saw them.

As a kid I also would bury my head in the side of a stuffed chair and look at the images the ambient noise made. I used to say these were cartoons, but while they weren't cartoons, the colors were bright, vibrant and cartoonish. When I was older and alone I'd do the same thing trying to recreate the experience, but it wasn't until recently I realized the hit and miss quality of it had everything to do with the noise in the room.

What finally started on the realization that this was not normal was discovering that the rest of you don't see lightning when your eyes are closed, your head under a pillow and the lightning hasn't arrived yet....

When I hear thunder, I see flashes of light, which is normal, except that since the speed of light and the speed of sound are different, I usually see the lightning twice, once when I hear the thunder, and a second time when I see the lightning...and the lightning is pink, blue or off white the second time, and a preternatural white the rest of the time.

Since discovering that not everyone else has this, we've explored the limit of it. I see colors for sound, and the colors are brighter the louder the noise is. Normal ambient noise, in a well-lit room usually goes unnoticed, but loud sharp noises, or noises in a dimly lit or largely white room start to annoy me.

Perhaps strangely enough, we're not convinced it's really *sound* that causes this, as the effect seems to have a direct correlation to physical sensations of vibration. Touching a subwoofer, for example, causes the colors to become so bright, and so prevalent, that it's pretty much all I can see, while headphones induce only mild colors, unless turned way up.

But if I, trained and knowledgeable about this stuff, thought my experiences were normal, I believe that synesthesia is much more prevalent than we assume.

Not sure where I was going with this, except to say that I wish I had it in one of those dramatic forms, rather than thin clouds of color that a colorful room can eliminate.