Do you feel that people who get proprietary over baby names have a point?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve found the Dopers to, on the whole, be a reasonable and rational people, not prone to hysteria or foolishness. So maybe my question doesn’t apply to this community as a whole, but nevertheless, here we go. I read advice columns because, frankly, I like reading about other peoples’ problems. One theme that I’ve seen coming up over the past decade or so is this perceived ownership that a lot of people tend to have over baby names. It goes like this: “I’ve wanted to name my baby boy Pubert since I was a teenager. Then, Glory Be, my husband and I got pregnant. At about the same time, I found out that my cousin was pregnant, and she wants to name the baby Pubert!!! I am so hurt and outraged! Pubert was my name. I’m thinking of cutting my cousin out of my life over this betrayal yada yada yada…” And uniformly, the advice columnist will tell the reader to get over herself, that nobody owns baby names, etc.

I’m curious what Dopers think of this. To me, these letter writers who get butthurt over someone else using their baby name are just being hysterical Karens, but having never been a parent, maybe I’m missing some aspect of this. So what do you guys think? Would you be upset if a loved one named their baby the name you were going to give yours?

[Aside]One night over a couple of J’s, Mrs. H and I discussed the names we’d have given our children if we’d had them. We landed on Elias William for a boy, and we’d call him “Will.” For a girl, we landed on Holly Grace, and we’d call her “Grace,” since Holly [OurLastNameWhichBeginsWithH] wouldn’t work. Then about an hour later we realized we’d named our hypothetical children Will & Grace.[/Aside]

2

They need to get over it. It’s not like the other child will live in the same household and there’ll be confusion over who is who.

3

The world doesn’t revolve around any single one of us and those folks are being a little melodramatic when it comes to names.

I will say that a lot of people do get overly upset over trivial things. Sometimes even reasonable people get butthurt over stupid things. Especially when it comes to their kids.

4

First, I loved your anecdote at the end! You nailed it, no one owns the rights to a name. If they love the name that much then they should just use it. If they’re that upset over someone else in the family using it first well there are a lot of names out there, choose another. I think the entire I’m going to cut this person out of my life is very much over the top.

5

There are cultures even today where baby-naming includes a healthy dose of coordination among the extended families. Such as (made up example) First born boy MUST be named for paternal great grandfather. Unless that name is already taken in which case …

Which is great until you get multiple competing pregnancies among the down line of said great grandfather.

Beyond those special cases I agree with the general “Get over yourself!”


Bigger picture:
Advice columns, whether online or in print media are nothing but the predecessors to clickbait.

Even if real, and IMO that’s a rarity, the letters are cherrypicked so the columnist can provide the most discussion-worthy answers to the most tongue-cluckingly stupid situations.

Not a lot of point IMO in investing effort in understanding this stuff, or applying it to the real world. It’s right up there with Jersey Shore and the WWE in terms of realism.

6

This is why I would only name (hypothetical) children after Greek gods or non-historical* characters from Shakespeare’s plays. That way, the only people who can claim some kind of proprietary interest in the name are dead and so are their heirs, and if someone else also names their kid with the same moniker, we’re both stealing from the same source.

Stranger

*I did know a couple who named their children Octavian, Claudius, Tiberius, and Agrippina, which…what the every loving fuck is wrong with these people? I guess it is fortunate that they didn’t have more boys, and I can only wonder at what they would have named another girl: Livia? Messalina? Julia is innocuous and common enough in general but in that context would have been pretty awful.

7

My sister was outraged that our cousin named their first born son the same name as her first born son who was born six weeks earlier.

The name was one of the given names of the babies common great grandfather.

I believe the two children (now in their 30s) have only “met” on a handful of occasions. By met, I mean been in the same room. One 100th birthday celebration and a couple of weddings. Each occasion had an attendance of many hundreds.

My sister insisted that as her son was the first born male of the fourth generation, she had dibs on Grandpa’s names.

Say grandpa was named Matthew Mark Luke John Williams. She wanted to have exclusive right to all four given names (and yes grandpa did have four given names, it was part of the culture to honor as many ancestors, relatives and local luminaries by naming your children after them, especially first born sons.

8

It can be a little confusing to have cousins with the same name, and so I think it would be completely reasonable for family members to discuss this (in advance) and agree on different names. If everyone involved so agrees.

But it’s only a little confusing, and it’s just as confusing if, for instance, two family members both marry someone with the same name (or someone marries someone with the same name as a family member), and you can’t very well agree not to do that. I have a cousin who has the same first name as I do, and several other instances of the same name in the extended family, and if it ever causes ambiguity, the usual practice is to say who they’re connected to the family through (for instance, just Ed, or Old Ed, or Grandpap or Pappy, is the patron of the extended family; P’s Ed is the Ed married to P, and C’s Ed is the Ed who’s the son of C (and who was specifically named after Grandpap).

Although… Apparently when I was born, my father rejected a couple of names my mother suggested, because I already had a second cousin of those names, but then he suggested a name that I already had a first cousin of. Just one more dysfunction in that relationship.

9

Thank you, you are too kind! To this day Mrs. H and I will watch a kid misbehaving and mumble to ourselves, “Will or Grace would have never acted like that.”

10

You think that’s bad? My uncle Pat married someone named Pat, so now it’s “Uncle and Aunt Pat”.

11

That sounds like a truly awful SNL skit that would nonetheless make it past dress and into the latter third of the show as filler.

Stranger

12

Eh, I’ve taught classes with 4 or 5 students with the same popular name, like Tiffany or Justin. It’s usually fine.

13

I don’t write to an advice columnist when I get cut-off in traffic, or when my sister is rude to me, or when I get butt-hurt for some other reason.

But yes, I choose names that were different to people I know, or that were already taken, because, God forgive me, I have trouble accepting the fact that my kid is actually a different person than that other person with the same name.

So I would get butt-hurt if somebody else stole or copied the name I wanted. I’d get over it, but I’d be hurt.

Get back to me when you name your kid “Donald”

14

In Persian culture, it’s considered extremely rude to name your child after a living family member. It’s regarded as a wish for that person to die.

If nothing else, it solves the “no, I wanted to name my son after beloved Uncle Mahmoud!” problem.

15

Now that’s funny!

Hey, I have dibs on that great granddad example. You butt out! :grin:


Unrelated to that levity …

We’ve done this topic a few times, as well as whether it’s OK for people to get pregnant out of order versus their sibs or cousins.

16

Jewish as well, but it just kicks the can down the road until that person dies. Then you get the same tsuris about who gets to name their kid after the deceased person (which is an expected way to honor that person).

17

I have, too, and yeah, it generally works out. Like I said, only slightly confusing.

Once, I had two students with the same name, who were best friends, and sat right next to each other. And both would often raise their hands at the same time. They mostly seemed to decide for themselves which of the two I was calling on.

But what about two kids named after the same already-dead family member? Like, if Mahmoud dies, and then a couple of years later, two of his nephews both have boys. Are they both allowed to name their sons after Uncle Mahmoud?

18

I’m trying to work out what my son would have been named if such a rule applied here. Best I can figure, if we’re referring to the baby’s paternal great-grandfather, then my son would have been named LaVerne H. If it was after the father’s paternal great-grandfather, I’d have just had to pick something out of a book because I legit don’t know what his name would have been.

19

It gets even more confusing in cultures where even the father (and sometimes mother) doesn’t know the father’s name.

20

If it’s your close family members, and you anticipate that your kids are going to be spending a lot of time together, maybe you have a point. Maybe.

Some of my best friends, “John” and “Mary,” got very possessive about the name that they had chosen to give to a potential future daughter (“Kaitlyn”). Everyone in their circle of friends knew the name that they had chosen, for years, because, as they really liked the name, they talked about it. (My wife and I also had a name we had chosen, which wound up never being used, as we were unable to have kids, but similarly, our friends knew the name we had chosen.)

Anyway, some friends of John and Mary had a daughter a year or so before Mary got pregnant, and they named her Kaitlyn. John was very upset about this, and strongly felt that the other parents had “stolen” his future daughter’s name, to the point that he went on about this, on a regular basis, for months.

It didn’t stop John and Mary from naming their daughter Kaitlyn anyway, and the friends who had also used the name were not even close friends of theirs – these were people whom John and Mary saw once or twice a year, so it’s not like the two Kaitlyns were going to be frequent playmates or something. Personally, I thought John’s anger over this was ridiculous, but I was a kind friend, and kept my trap shut.

When I was in grade school, I was one of three boys in my class who not only had the same first name, but our last names all started with the same letter. (To be fair, my first name was the #1 most popular name for baby boys throughout most of the 1960s and early 1970s.) The teachers worked around it.