My Name Is....

Things that we are getting used to - and can't live without - name. Everyone have a name, and names I might add. Everything has a name. Even rocks have name ie: granite, calcite etc. As everybody know, my name is Nadiah. Thats just it. Short. Though if you look into my identity card you would see that my name is so long.Too long. My inital in the IC - NDHAZ. Long enough? N is for my name and the rest is for my Abah's name. I still don't know how my big brother and sister managed to cut the D part but they did. Then anyway that's the name that I was born into and the name that I would go to grave with.

So what does nadiah means? All my life I know that nadiah means 'generous'. Hmm... generous to the shopping complex and shops? Yikes! In a bookstore where they sell all this keychains with name meaning it was written that nadiah means and assembly. Now that's confusing. So I did some digging. I know my name is of arabic origin and the search through internet shows that the name nadia/nadya/nadiah is of arabic, russian and hebrew origin.

In arabic there's 2 meaning. One is for generous, and the other is the beginning. In Russian it means hope while in hebrew it means an assembly. In arabic, if you spelled it wrongly it may mean differently. As an example for my younger bro's name. My abah intended it to mean "the smile of the religion" (if i'm not mistaken) and then one day my bro's teacher spelled the name wrongly in arabic lettering on his exercise book by exchanging one letter to make it mean "the barking of the religion" - my abah knows arabic very well so he starts to point the mistake. My bro doesn't care so til today he spells his name in arabic to the barking one. Same thing goes for those with chinese name, different way of saying a name makes it mean differently. A late friend of mine told me to correct my pronunciation of his name because I was calling him "shameless flower".

Whatever my name means, I know my parents meant for it to have a good meaning. A name is a prayer for those who have it. Imagine a person name that means stupid. That person, even though is not stupid may be banished to stupidity because everyone is calling him stupid. I asked my mak, which meaning did they intend for me when I was born. And so she said - "generous". So here I am, Nadiah, the generous... I hope I won't be generous to un-necessary place *gulp.