We’ve all seen lists of the most common baby names. And we may have seen lists tracking how certain names cycle in and out of fashion. But I’ve never seen a list like this before.
A young couple I know recently had a baby, a little girl that they named Se’lah.
Unusual name. I searched for information about it. The word is found in the Hebrew bible apparently, and not everyone agrees on what the word even means. The couple is not Jewish, they just heard the word somewhere and went with it.
My stepdaughter put a superfluous apostrophe in her first kid’s name. She now wishes she hadn’t. I didn’t ask her what the hell she was thinking in the first place.
Not quite the same, but I have a friend who’s given name is Cassie, but pronounced Casey. Naturally she’s spends more time than she cares to either correcting people or just answering to the wrong name because it’s faster.
On top of that, her last name is one letter off from a more common last name, for example, Smiths, when the more common name would be Smith. Then after 25 years of saying “Smiths, not Smith”, it was all pointless because her married name is Smith.
It’s funny how many people did go to the trouble of fixing a misspelled name. I’ve known three Issacs, four Micheals, two Chasitys, and a large number of Johnathan, Jonnathon, Jonothon variations. And many of their parents got really sniffy if you spelled their version of the name “wrong.”
“Selah” is real Hebrew, and therefore a legitimate and interesting name, I guess. “Se’lah”, not sure if the apostrophe is supposed to stand for an aleph or a ayin, either way, is completely made up. Maybe it is supposed to be a sophisticated interlingual creation (no Hebrew elements at all).
Confusing (how does one pronounce “Casey”, anyway?) IME “Cassie” sometimes stands for Cassiopeia, Cassandra. “Casey” could be Cathasaigh.
Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey Jones you better watch your speed.
IIRC, it was one of those ‘wanted a boy, had a girl’ type compromises. I believe she may have since legally changed it to Cassandra just to make her life easier, it’s what most people seem to assume it’s short for when they see Cassie and I think she ran into a few hiccups along the way when those incorrect assumptions made it on to something official.
Not the usual reason, but …shortly after the Columbine killings in Colorado, a local columnist lamented that the beautiful state flower name they’d given their daughter would now forever be associated with that incident.
Like pronouncing the letters ‘K’ and ‘C’. My wife morphed into a Casey when her first and middle initials got into some junk mail list as KC, and eventually someone translated that to ‘Casey’ and the entry propagated through other lists.
Are some of these changes due to true regret (what a dumbass name I gave my kid) or due to misspellings? Issac to Isaac is just a misspell, not because the parents later hated the name.