Midori [OT?]

[Douglas G. Wilson]

> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori
> >
> > Apparently there is also a manga character who has the given name Midori
> > written with kanji for "beautiful bird" or so rather than "green". ....
>
>... Do you remember the Japanese figure skater from a
>decade or so back whose first name was "Midori"? I used to wonder why
>her parents had named her "Green." ....

The above link mentions skater M. Ito and violinist M. [Goto], plus an
American Midori or two.

Ms. Ito and Ms. Goto apparently use hiragana for their given names. Quick
and naive and presumably unreliable glance at the Web suggests that when a
kanji version of this given name appears it is often the common "green" but
that it's more often written phonetically in hiragana (thus not explicit in
meaning, I guess, although probably usually taken to mean "green" if
anybody thinks about it, I suppose), with relatively very few examples of
the few other possible kanji writings which are evident to me. "Midori
Blake" was a character-name in McKenna's SF (terraforming) story "Hunter,
Come Home" (1964, apparently) [this was the first Midori of my acquaintance
IIRC]; I see the same name "Midori Blake" associated with some sort of
'drama' called "The Gaia Hypothesis" online. "Midori" is taken to be the
color of 'verdure' in Japanese (say the books), so maybe it's got a certain
connotation of life/fertility in the real and the SF names. The word also
appears as an attribute of jade, which might be expected to contribute to
its popularity, I think. But then again, maybe it just "sounds nice".

-- Doug Wilson

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