As far as I’m concerned, you can open the dictionary to a random page, and throw a dart at it. If you kid gets named Drain, Cashew, Fuchsia, Prostate, or Yeoman, so be it, but spell the damn thing right.
I feel sorry for the kids I meet named Kortnee, Khessenndra, Leighah, Emmaleigh, and my “favorite” (:dubious:) Krystiyan. For cripes sake, there is a right way to spell “Christian.” I felt very sorry for a kindergarten teacher I knew who one year had something like this on her roster: Brittany, Britney, Bretagne, Brittni, and Britnie, plus two Briannas pronounced differently, and a Briyona, and just to make it crazier, a boy named Brian. She had to remember each spelling, and which one went with which child, and parents got really mad if she screwed up.
You aren’t allowed to go around spelling other words just any old way you want, and that goes for the names of your children too. Aside from a few names that have variants because they have come from different countries, names have fixed spellings. Don’t go mucking with them. That goes double for people who don’t understand the rules of orthography. “Lisa” cannot be spelled “Leca,” because a C followed by an A is a hard C.
Euretha? Sounds like another misguided soul who knows just enough anatomy to be dangerous.
I am a RN and worked in Labor & Delivery early in my career. I had a patient in the early 90s who named her daughter Placenta. How do you gently and tactfully talk a new mom out of doing that to her kid? It crosses my mind occasionally that there is a young woman walking around somewhere stuck with that.
Hee! The thing is, as has been said by others, it’s the association that dictates what names are “good” or “bad”. To me, the actual sound of the word placenta is kind of pretty, as if it were the Spanish word for pleasant or something. However, since we know what it actually means, um, just no. Ditto diarrhea (band name!). It’s not bad sounding at all, in and of itself, but obviously you’re not going to be encountering a Miss Diarrhea Jones out in the wild any time soon.
Actually Samuel is more popular than it has been in the 116 years in this Social Security search. (I can’t seem to be able to link to a specific search, but you can do a new one.) In 2016, it was in 21st place. 80 years ago it was in 67th place. (I blame Supernatural.)
Lots of my relatives have biblical names such as Sarah, David, Matthew, James, etc. Other biblical names seem less popular–none of my relatives are named Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Abednigo, or Melchizedek.
I know more Fundamental Christians with that name than I know Jews with that name, and I know more Jews than Fundies.
I do, however, know a few kids with the lesser prophets like Zephaniah and Hosea as middle names, and Israel is full of people with really obscure biblical names.
I also have a cousin named Malachi who goes by “Malky” in the US. He has lived a good deal of his life in Israel, and I don’t actually know what he was called there.
I figured it must be popular in some circles, which doesn’t make it any better. Old man association aside, it’s just not a pleasant sounding name. We all refer to him as Sam, or Baby Sam, or Sammy D. Nobody uses his full name when they ask about him.
My kids have three female friends named Karly, Carlee and Carly. And Emily and Emilee. But these variants are mild compared to what people are coming up with now.
I realize this isn’t entirely new, as I know a few Marcs in addition to lots of Marks. But some of the spellings are just ridiculous.
When we had our oldest, one of the other new mothers-to-be at the birthing classes looked at a poster and said “Hmm, Chlamydia would make a pretty name.” And, no, she was not joking. I’m hoping someone talked her out of it.
About all the truly odd spellings, are they deliberate, or do the parents have a less than firm grasp of orthographics? Does the kid usually go along with it?
Or the kids grow up and legally change their names - it is, after all, an option for any of us to do that at least in the US (Presumably other places, too, but I’ve only lived here).
I have a surname that isn’t intuitive to spell nor pronounce, and I’ve spent my entire life having to do just that. it’s a mild inconvenience, at most, and “mild form of torture” overstates things, IMO.
The sense I’ve gotten is that parents like the sound of a particular name, but want to give their child a unique spelling of it. So, I suspect, it’s deliberate in most cases.
The Japanese have it worse–knowing how their names are “spelled” doesn’t lead to knowing how they are pronounced, and knowing how they are pronounced doesn’t lead to knowing how they are “spelled.” Imagine every time that you meet someone that the “O” in your name is the “O” from “ostrich”, not the “O” from “orange”…
This is untrue. Japanese syllables are always pronounced the same. Otoko, onna, otearai the O’s are all pronounced the same. Spelling you might have a point because they can be written in kanji or hiragana or katakana.
I think Agnes is a beautiful name. It always make me think of David Copperfield. Stanley Ann was the name of Barack Obama’s mother. I could go for a fad of female Stanleys.
The really amusing part is that in 80 years or so, Ashley, Tiffany and Brittany will be the names that sound like old women.
Very much not African-Americans, but right know there are quite a few guys in any Hispanic country you care to name and in their 20s named Yerái (including several footballers).
It’s the transcription to Spanish of the word Jedi, as it was pronounced in the Spanish dubbing of Star Wars (Chapter IV), which tried to reproduce the English pronunciation; later dubbings changed the pronunciation to match what people had reconverted it to (the Spanish transcription of this new pronunciation would be Yédi).
And I know of at least two little girls called Arya-with-a-y.
Names evolve, as do any other words. Firstnames and brands, even more often than other nouns.
Rebecas my age, their mother liked the song “Sombra de Rebeca”. Rebecas under 20, parents are involved in neochatecumenate. Esthers my age, I know one and she was born on March 23rd, feast of St. Esther, Queen (yes, the same Esther celebrated in Purim). There are two among the children in my brother’s neochatecumenate group (Esther and Ana Esther).
How do you gently and tactfully talk a new mom out of doing that to her kid? It crosses my mind occasionally that there is a young woman walking around somewhere stuck with that.
