Most-regretted baby names

Not a person but the felid member of the household was dubbed Casey which is long for KC which in turn is short for Kitty Cat. This was all before we knew his sex and subsequently fixed it.

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Yes, indeed, he sure did.

Fighting ignorance since forever. Still taking longer than we thought.

I know of a male Beverly. He’s a client where I work and I was kind of surprised to see he was 40-something. I figured he’d be much older at first.

One of my uncles is named Leslie but he’s always gone by Les. All the other Leslies I know are women.

My older niece has a very creative spelling of a name that already has lots of different variant spellings. I’ve never seen anyone else with this name spelled the way hers is. My sister has said that if she had it to do over again she would have gone with a less creative spelling.

Well, that might be why they use single-letter first names. All I know is that there are a lot who do!

And yes, there ARE such names–but never count on IT using logic. Same as many sites that require more than a single letter for a first name.

In this lady’s case, I was predicting that she’d use “Kay”, since that’s easy and not confusing. But, as noted, it hasn’t come up.

I have to admit that I’ve never understood the phenomenon of naming someone the short-form/diminutive of a name. It seems like it does little but cause the sorts of problems your brother faced, as well as not quite letting him be “Lawrence” if he so chooses when he’s older.

I mean, why name someone “Chris” instead of “Christopher”? You can always call them Chris if you want.

A friend of mine was going to name her first son Oliver Joel until someone pointed that would mean he would ‘O.J.’
I said no one would remember OJ Simpson by the time he was grown up. Turns out I was wrong.
They settled for calling the first one Oliver and the second one Joel.

There are ways of letting a girl know that her father really, really wanted her to be a boy. Like naming her Floydene Earlene. I saw that name in the records of a National Guard unit I did work for,

Mr.Wrek had an uncle. He married first a lady who named her kids normal names of the time. Think John and Edward, Rose and Mary.
His second wife had 5 boys.
They were (spelling??) Buddy, Bittie, Teensy, Nubbin and Roy.
I often wondered how Roy felt.

(I’m sure those were nicknames, but I swear I never have known the real names)

He also had an Aunt Sister. She wasn’t a nun.

It’s like a line from A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – “Sounds like four dogs and a parrot.”

Very few parents these days, even if they anticipate a future jurist, will name their child Kenesaw Mountain.

No, you probably did not.

Google tossed this up:

Born the sixth of seven children on November 20, 1866 in Milville, OH, Landis received his colorful name from Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, where his father, Abraham Landis, had been seriously wounded during the Civil War.

Ya gotta wonder why the kid would be named for a place with such bad memories. Wikipedia expands upon the naming process thusly:

Abraham Landis had been wounded fighting in the U.S. Army at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain in Georgia, and when his parents proved unable to agree on a name for the new baby, Mary Landis proposed that they call him Kenesaw Mountain. At the time, both spellings of “Kenesaw” were used, but in the course of time, “Kennesaw Mountain” became the accepted spelling of the battle site.[[2]]

A lot of people must’ve had the same idea. There are so many Kadens/Cadens/Caydens out there.

Well, if you say so. But I get bonus points for my vivid memories of the paperwork & discussions, 'k?

Another possibility is Cornelius, the given first name of basketball star Connie Hawkins as well as longtime baseball manager Connie Mack (whose surname was shortened from McGillicuddy).

That sounds like a Southern thing. My grandfather’s name was Jesse, but he and his brothers were all prefaced by "B’ ", pronounced “Buh”, short for “Brother”: “B’Jesse”, “B’Willie”, “B’Arthur”. He had sisters, too, but of course, they weren’t called “Brother”; no, they were “Sis’Pearl” and “Sis’Mary Alice”.

Looking at that list, at least 1/2 of the regretted names are spelled correctly (and Michael was on both lists)

I suspect quite a few of those were in the same situation my brother was in: his given name at birth was firstname middlename, but he was called by his middle name all his life. Eventually he legally changed middlename to his first name

My former step-grandfather used to go by Bunny. Which was weird, until you found out that his actual given name was Adolf. Not too many German Jews like to go by Adolf anymore.