pag-sígaw

  ― Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body

Haymitch, Peeta, Hazelle, Leevy, Maysilee, Finnick and Greasy Sae look bizarre when you first see them written down, but then if you think about how they look and/or sound it's pretty clear that they're meant to be modern names, only modern names that have changed spelling and pronounciation over time— as you would have expected them to have done so over how ever many hundreds of years it's been since our modern day.

(Remember, though The Hunger Games themselves have only been going on for 75 years, the universe they're in is canonically post-apocalyptic— the reason nobody ever mentions what's happening in the rest of the world is that everywhere except America was destroyed in a nuclear war. We're not given much of an indication how long it's been since then.)

Peeta is Peter, Haymitch is Hamish, and Hazelle is Hazel, Maysilee is Maisie— the changes in pronunciation are slight (Peeta and Peter are already virtually identical in my accent), and the spelling has changed to match.

Leevy is either a corruption of Lily, or more likely I suspect 'Livvy', a common nickname for Olivia; Finnick is probably from Finnegan (shorten in to 'Finneg' and then say it over and over very fast); Sae could be short for Sarah, or Sally or even Susan— it's not uncommon for nicknames to become real names in their own right (look at Harry or Molly as examples).

I also love the trend of having District 1 parents give their kids names relating to the luxury items their district produces— Glimmer, Marvel, Gloss, Cashmere, Velvereen (presumably a corruption of 'velveteen'), Facet— because those things are all a) objectively pretty/nice (like naming a kid 'Diamond' or 'Star' today) and presumably status symbols in their district.

Meanwhile District 3 does the same thing, but all the pronunciations are corrupted. You've got technical names to do with the manufacture of electronics— Wiress (wireless), Circ (circuit)— but you've also got what I'm pretty sure are meant to be corruptions of modern brand names— Beetee (BT), Teslee (Tesla).

To me this kind of suggests that District 3 is less conscious of this influence than District 1. Like, parents in 1 are more likely to deliberately think "I'll name my kid Glimmer, because things that glimmer are pretty" whereas 3 as a culture might have genuinely forgotten that those names used to mean something, in the same way that most of us don't think much about how the name 'Arthur' comes from the old word for 'Bear'.

And of course, then you've got the Capitol leaning hard into those ancient Roman vibes with names like Fulvia, Plutarch, Seneca, Tigris… but still using the European/American personal name+family name format, which the Romans didn't really do. Like it's very clear that this is a future society fetishising the classical era, rather than an actual resurgence of Roman culture.

She’s not used to the quiet. After all those years, living with others and picking out their voices—their inflections, the lives their languages betrayed—the sound of teacups clink, clink, clinking—the sirens overhead—the silence is unkind, is all. She’d put music on if she could afford it, if it didn’t remind her too much of dancing. Flashes of her bent wrist over a pale hand, an arc tracing farewell. As it is, she has to make do with pitter-patter, the constant reminder she’s above-ground.

She could imagine it all too clearly, “come here,” two words slurred into one. Alfred had always known of this simmering sadness, this residual grief—not hers, really, just inherited. “Come here,” he would say—c'mere—dragging her to his warmth and then that complicated tangle of hands, touching like they’d found they were now allowed to. Like the very act could shoo the sadness away. If he were here, he would sway her to humming under their breaths, a melody she can now barely recall, so sweet as to be from a dream. If he were here, perhaps she could stand her own mind.