TAG | Yemayah
…would smell as sweet? Maybe, but if it were called ‘Stinkwort’ I for one would be less likely to get close enough to tell.
The more observant and curious amongst you may have been wondering why, when our boat is called ‘Ordu’, this blog is called ‘Lady Stardust’. Well might you ask, and I shall now answer. When we bought Ordu one of the last things I asked about her was her name. This is just as well because I really, really don’t like the word ‘Ordu’ and if I had known this was her name from the start I probably wouldn’t have looked at her.
The cliche is that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I’ve noticed that there are some people and some words that don’t mix. For example, I don’t like the word ‘scrumptious’. It positively makes my flesh crawl (I was probably traumatised by watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when I was a child). I don’t know why this should be, but although ‘Ordu’ isn’t quite in the ‘scrumptious’ category it still doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t even like saying it because I find it to be ugly and graceless, which can be a problem when it is the name of your boat.
Ordu is, in fact, a port on the Black Sea cost of Turkey with an illustrious history. According to its Wikipedia entry it was at one time the headquarters of the Ottoman Empire army (although nowadays it is better known as being the centre of the Turkish hazelnut production business). The word actually means ‘army’ in Turkish. This, in its own way, makes it even less appealing to me as the name of boat – I want our boat to be a place of relaxation, not the means of launching an invasion.
As a digression, when we bought Ordu we were told (amongst other things) that she had been used as a harbour partol boat by the Dutch Navy, had originally had a ‘gun emplacement’ on her foredeck and took part in the the evacuation of Dunkirk in the Second World War. I didn’t really believe this but she was old enough to have taken part so I checked with the Dutch Navy to see if they had any record of her. They hadn’t, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t true (although it probably isn’t).
Anyway, even allowing for this it became clear to us that ‘Ordu’ was not a satisfactory name. There are folk out there who will tell you that changing the name of a boat is unlucky – they had a friend who changed the name of his/her boat and his/her leg fell off the very next day. There are undoubtedly some superstitions which are worth observing (not walking under a ladder, for example, in case the twit on top of it drops a hammer on your head) but renaming a boat is not something I personally believe will upset the balance of Ordu’s personality. Besides which, as you will see if you read (and I write) on that she’s been almost completely remade anyway, so I’m going to rename the new boat regardless.
My Yemayah picture
The first replacement name we found was ‘Yemayah’. Yemayah is the yoruban goddess of the ocean and patron deity of survivors in shipwrecks. Now I know that I’ve already said that I don’t believe in superstitious nonsense, but all the same I like name and it kind of fits. I even went as far as to design a picture to make into a flag for her. I copied the design nearly wholesale from an image I saw on the internet, but since I re-drew it myself and it was for my ‘personal use’ I didn’t see the problem. Besides, it was highly unlikely that anyone would recognise it anyway.
And this, it turned out, was the problem with the name Yemayah. The following is typical of conversations we had many times:
- Friend: “So what are you calling her then?”
- Me: “Yemayah”
- Friend: “Yer what-er?”
- Me: “Yemayah”
- Friend: “What’s that?”
- Me: “Well, She’s a yoruban sea goddess”
- Friend: “Yo what-un?”
- Me: “Yoruban”
- Friend: “What’s that?”
- Me: “Well, it’s a religion from West Africa, particularly Nigeria, which….. oh, never mind”
Yemayah, it seemed, was not an ideal choice. OK, so we need an alternative. Selena and I thought about it for some days and then David, the supreme deity that He is, came to our rescue. We’d call her ‘Lady Stardust‘ in his honour, and with a wink at Marc too – “Awful nice, really quite paradise” indeed.
