Baby naming

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

(This may have been covered by other threads - feel free to point me in that way if so…)

The wife and I are heading down the road to having a child and, of course, the name game has come up more than once. We’ve settled on a handful of prospective names and crossed out more than a few after seeing them listed on any “Top 100 Baby Names of [$RECENT_YEAR]”

There’s more - while working a temp job shuffling insurance papers, the wife handled more than a infant claims and came across more than a few name that should cause the parents to be locked up. (For instance, you wouldn’t believe the number of young girls being named “Shania”)

To summarize:
Names you like and names you hate. Discuss.

2

Like:

Robin
Max
Zoe
Nick
Heath
Jarrod (there’s a fire in the barn!) (sorry)
Jody

Dislike:

Sumner (and just about any last name taken as a first name)
Taletha/Lisbeth/Tirone (any name that looks like the parents don’t know how to spell the real one)

3

I’ll toss some around…

We liked “Olivia” for a while, until we saw that several lists had it as high as 12th for the last few years. Now we’re leaning toward “Naomi” or “Moira”. (I personally like the name “Rivka”, but my wife hates it.)

My sister, Hannah, had a semi-unique name until a few years ago. Now it’s among the top two to three names given to kids. (Quick story: we were at a local orchard during the fall and there were signs on the wall from local schools thanking them for the tours and whatnot. In one class, presumably first or second graders there were FOUR Hannahs. Out of about 30 kids.) She hates it.

4

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=61598

Right now we’re leaning heavily towards Maeve.

5

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=60269 has a good discussion of boy’s and girl’s names.

What kind of names did you and your wife like, unixrat? This will give a better idea of the kind of name you would dismiss out of hand.

My favorites:

Allegra (until it became allergy medicine :frowning: )
Juliet
Maureen
Maya

Alexander
Avery
Colin
Darius

6

I always say stick with the tried and true. Newfangled names just look stupid later on in life. No offense to anyone here named “Colby”, but please don’t name your child after a cheese.

The Bible has provided names for centuries. Names like “Zadok”, “Methusalah”, “Job”, “Delilah”, “Bathsheba” and “Able” just don’t go out of style.

7

Like:

Classics, as long as they’re not too overused: Katherine, Charlotte, Lucy, Helen, Isabel, Simon, Peter, Edward, Andrew.

Mildly offbeat, but legitimate, names: Ginevra, Lyndall, Briony, Cecily, Raphael, Sebastian, Eugene, Linus. (Yes, I know it is a very, very bad idea to name your son Linus, and I’m not going to do it. But I still like the name.)

Don’t like:

Trendy-Celtic names: Eoghan, McKenna.

Dead presidents: Tyler, Taylor, Madison, Kennedy, Reagan. (Well, dead or almost dead.)

Misspelled names: Britnee, Ashleigh, Kyndra, MiKayla, LaTisha, D’Wayne.

8

My brother and his wife are major yuppies. They have a nasty habit of giving their children last names as first names. At present, they have a Beck, a Jackson, a Bailey, and a Sera.

Rule of thumb: I realize it’s “trendy” to give your children last names as first names, but just say no.

9

I agree with those that say stick to tried and true. Trendy WILL look silly later on. If I could name a girl I would like Judith. Even if the story from the Apochrypha is most likely fictional, a gal with that kind of brains and guts is a good role model. For a boy I would like two names, but one would likely get the kid teased. Desmond, for South African Archbishop Tutu, would be good, but the other boys would probably rag him about it. I also like Thomas(for a friend with the name, and for St. Thomas More)

10

When we were picking out names for the little flodnaks, I tried to keep in mind that the kid was going to be stuck living with this name for his whole life. So it has to be a name that can be used in a lot of different situations. You need a name you can coo over a little newborn baby, but you also need one that won’t get him/her beaten up on the schoolyard. You need a name that sounds attractive when a member of the appropriate sex whispers it in your teenager’s ear, but that she/he can also wear, head held high, to a job interview. (Nicknames count.)

Most trendy names sound cute for babies, but some of them are going to be a serious burden fifteen or twenty years down the pike.

Don’t like last names used as first names. Don’t like place names used as first names. (I want the name of the person who started this epidemic… particularly with Brittany and its thousand spelling variations.) Skeptical of names with strong ethnic traditions being used with a last name that doesn’t “fit”: Maeve is a beautiful name, Maeve Kirchner is just odd. Skeptical of obscure Biblical names unless the family comes from a culture that has a tradition of using those names. Skeptical of giving every kid in the family a name that starts with the same letter, especially when this goes beyond three-four kids or if the parents also have the same initial.

Our boys are named Kenneth and Robert. For a girl, we were going to use the name Tanja. From our choice of names, you can probably guess that we like classics, although we were restricted by the fact that the names had to “work” in both our home languages.

11

For a girl, I have picked my absolute FAVORITE name, not because of any particular reason, I just like it

Charity

Does it get much better? For a guy, it doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal, because there are many less names. Go for something like Alex or William and you should be ok, no matter how it turns out.

Oh, and another thing, don’t name it Schlongface

12

You do NOT want to name your children

Keifer(boy)

Or

Kendall(girl)

because that’s what I named my kids…:stuck_out_tongue:

Actually there was a name for a girl I wish I had heard of before I named her…Keagan. I submit that for a girl.
Just don’t go the other way I was leaning for her, Raven, Montana or Lilith. To me , now they all sound like stripper/porn star names…(hey not that that’s a bad thing…)

I also like biblical names…Esther, Ruth, Sarah, Rachel.
If my daughter had been another son, I would have called him Edward Joseph…after my grandfather. Somehow incorporating family names is a way of honoring the past. (I would have called him EJ and my grandfather’s name was Edward James…but I liked the EJ thing)

13

I went with a name of Shakespearian fame with my daughter.

Funny, there were three other pregnant mothers I was acquainted about the same who were all naming their daughters Miranda too - the horror! I’m glad I didn’t change my mind though, I’ve yet to meet another Miranda since her birth and there are no others in her school.

Other names seriously considered were

Ophelia, Bianca, Francisca, Nerissa, and Ursula

The only name we would have chosen for a boy was Grayson, a family name from my father’s side.

14

Me and the wife are now kicking around the idea of naming our son Reiner. Well, that would be his middle name, first is George by default (family tradition). Before Reiner, I thought we had decided on Henry.

15

My brother recently had a baby. He and his wife named him…

Axel.

Poor freakin’ kid.

16

Names i could never give my children (no offense to those who have them, but i just couldn’t call my children them):

Cody
Randy
Katherine (there were 4 Katherines in my class at school)Gabrielle
Esther (you’d know why if you’re English)
Vanessa (same reasons)
Ophelia (she went mad! she drowned!)
Jane, Sarah, Lucy, Kirsten, Susan (too common)
Margaret, Ethel, Dorothy, Barbara, Mavis (too old, too Eastenders)
Roger
Reginald
Donald
Shirley (my married surname will be Bussey)

Anything named purposely after a celebrity.
Any name that is more commonly recognised as a noun.

I like the names:

Jack
Grace (my grandmother’s name so an exception to the above rule)
Ros

There’s not many i can feasible imagine bestowing on my kid for life.

I’m one of the few people i know who really likes their own name. I think it’s a good name. Apart from the tendancy for small children to shorten it to Franny and giggle.

Fran

17

I love that name. That’s the name of my great-grandmother. I also like Faith and Rose.

I had a friend named Americia. (pron: A-meh-reese-e-a) For some reason that always struck me as a beautiful, if not incredibly interesting name.

Of course, I’m not divulging the names I have in mind for my own children. 'Cause I don’t want any of you stealing them. :wink:

18

Cool. Name him Cool.

19

Anything you name your kid, even “Bindlefree Patrick MacMurphy,” within the following year a talent-free bubblegum pop music starlet or a twisted serial cannibal/killer will arise who has the exact same name.

20

When Mrs. Dave-Guy and I were expecting, we discussed errors in child-naming. Our main rule of thumb was “don’t give a kid a name that other kids can mangle and make fun of.” Other rules cropped up, such as totally offbeat names that are just plain weird, and names that are going to be misspelled and/or mispronounced.

Ultimately, we named our daughter after two people who were very special to us. Her first name, Lindsay, is actually taken from a man’s middle name. One of our favorite professors in college was John Lindsay Cogdill, so we honored him by naming our first-born after him. Her middle name, Robin, is the name of my wife’s best friend from college, who was also Maid of Honor at our nuptials. Lindsay Robin is a beautiful name, in our opinion.

Our son was named after my wife’s father, who died an untimely death shortly after we were married. His name was Harold (a name we both don’t really like). But he often called himself Hal, so we chose that for our son. It’s on his birth certificate as Hal, so it’s not the diminutive of anything. It’s just Hal. His middle name is Scott, which is a family surname from my side of the family. Hal Scott is a way cool name, if you ask me.

Both these names are difficult for mean-spirited kids to corrupt or stupid bureaucrats to misspell. But since our last name happens to be a common first name, we get mail addressed to very interesting parties anyway.