The Bard was wrong. Even as he wrote these words, Shakespeare was carving a niche for the names Romeo and Juliette which should be taken into account by any parent bestowing these names on their children.
One reserves a business’ name by testing its priority, but to overlook the implication of a name’s storied history would be to skip the essence of its poetry. The three DeWitt brothers, Dave, Gene and Burt, all went into their father’s machine tool business, and DeWitt Brothers Tool Company employed me for 23 years. Given that origin, DeWitt.com would seem a suitable identity for my company. However, the URL was long ago claimed by a squatter who set a high price for the Internet use of my family’s surname. Not surprisingly, many variations on 3D are also taken in the dot com world. However, 3DeWitt was unclaimed. Not everyone pronounces DeWitt as we do with a hard eee, but between the aim of this endeavor in 3D optics and the family’s name, there was a certain resonance in 3DeWitt.com. We bought it. I hope you pronounce it as I do.
Name choices have shaped my family. Both my mother and my father came from families that Americanized their ancestral surnames, so our family tradition is not so much in the name as the changing of the name. In marrying Beverly Botto, I proposed by asking her to name us anew, and she suggested Ditto. It was a brilliant choice. First of all, neither of us would abandon our individual selves by way of matrimony. Our new selves were our old selves. We were identical copies, the Dittos. Secondly, the root from the Latin verb decare is the Italian past participle, ditto, meaning “having been spoken.” Be it known to all, Mrs. Ditto and I are spoken for. One wonders, why does the groom bestow the surname anyway? Marriage is not patrimony; it is matrimony. One would think if anyone, the bride would provide. So forget all that and invent something new. The anagram of DeWitt and Botto combined into Ditto was a shuffle that reflected what we had in mind for our DNA. The little Ditto was born in 1996. He is the sum of our strengths and the difference of our weaknesses. We didn't name him Romeo.
Then there’s my blog handle, Zierot. If you have had some contact with professional clowns, the actors who make mistakes on purpose, you’d know that they differentiate themselves by costume, make-up and name. I might have passed muster on makeup and costume in this guild, because I invented the electronic process, Pantomation, which allows my body to control an animated computer model. My avatar can take any appearance, one that is unique. “Zierot” was my choice for unique a nom de scène. It has its roots in Zero the Fool and the Commedia dell'Arte character, Pierrot. To my knowledge, there is no other clown bearing this combined moniker. Zierot’s sometimes lamentable struggles are in the fashion of the Romantic period perfected in France in the nineteenth century by the father and son master mimes, Jean-Gaspard and Jean-Charles Deburau. In the twentieth century, Marcel Marceau’s portrayed some of the melancholy of Pierrot less some of the hapless incompetence of my Zero side. By why is this text coming from the pen of a mime? I draw my inspiration from the silent Marks Brother whose memoir, Harpo Speaks, is as articulate as his clowning was hilarious.
