Neil

Anglicized from the Gaelic Niall, an ancient Irish personal name traditionally linked to words for cloud, champion, or passion. Norse invaders carried it across the Irish Sea, Scottish clans made it standard issue, and American records absorbed it without fuss during nineteenth-century immigration.

The name reads like a man who knows how to operate a soldering iron and does not make a speech about it. It sits comfortably between the Apollo program and late-seventies soft rock. Today the average Neil is fifty-one years old and possesses an unflashy competence. He probably remembers when lawn mowers were entirely mechanical.