That sounds right for Jordan, but not Jasmine. According to this, Jasmine and 3 other spellings of it make up 4 of the top 20 “blackest” girl names.
Understood. There should be an option that’s easy for the average speaker of the language that you’re living in to say.
Heh. Yeah, as the child of an Icelandic immigrant, I cringed any time someone mentioned Eyafjallajökull in the news. :smack:
My name is probably far less unsual, but I insisted on making sure that people pronounced it the way I wanted it pronounced. (It’s Natasha, not Natalia, Natalie, Latasha, Natanya or NutASHuh that folks tried to pronounce it as.) Perhaps I was inflexible about it because the folks who would appellate me incorrectly would do it for months and months at a time; you are *exceedingly patient *for accepting folks mispronouncing your name on a regular basis. (I also have a middle name that is regularly misspelled because it’s an ethnic name that most folks don’t use in the States.)
Agreed. I have to wonder why folks want to deliberately make it difficult for their children to get their names correctly spelled on forms. My only real exception to the “made up names are totally okay by me” rule is that I hate the name Nevaeh. Meeting a person with that name or a person who named their kid that is like meeting all those glurge emails wrapped up in a box of stupid with a poorly tied bow. :mad:
What does it say about me that I hate just about every name on that list, black or white? I think I in general don’t like names that seem like you just picked out the first thing you saw in the baby name book.
MOL, I completely agree with you. Most of the names are insipid, emasculating, or just plain overplayed for me at this point. I don’t want a return of the Robert and Susan club, but I’d like some new names that don’t seem like they’re piggybacking off the top 10 names from 2003.
Oh, no.Pssst!. Look at the whited-out message beside the link.
I’ve taught a lot of little white and Hispanic girls named Jasmine (or variations thereof). It’s a common black name, but it’s ALSO a common white and Hispanic name. I think it’s just generally popular. I think it’s Aladdin.
The teasing is more of a problem when they are younger. Especially if you give them a name that rhymes with a bodily function.
Yep, that’s the biggest problem with certain kinds of black names:
“What kind of parent is most likely to give a child such a distinctively black name? The data offer a clear answer: an unmarried, low-income, undereducated, teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself.”
Even if you take race out of it, a name that’s associated with coming from that background really can’t help you.
All names are ultimately made up. Yet, if your primary goal is to be creative when naming your child, get a cat and call it something funny.
I wouldn’t be surprised to meet a white Jasmine or anything, but that’s what the list says and I assume it comes from real data.
My daughter’s name is also on the list which surprised me when I originally saw this story in 2006 because it’s never been a common name on the SS database, but it’s an awesome name so that’s okay. My boyfriend’s name is on the list too but that’s no surprise.
My name is never on any list and I like that.
I wonder if “sounding” means they gave people a long list of names and that those were the ones people identified as “white” names or “black” names most consistently. So it’s not really about what people actually name there kids, but what impression people have of those kids.
I wish they’d redo that study with class indicators rather than race indicators: I bet Andre and Asia get called back a lot more than Synasty or Willie do, and I also suspect that Connor and Abigail get called back more often than Duane and Tammy do.
Jasmine is perfectly good for a girl who’s white, black, or hispanic: as long as she is a stripper.
Perhaps. Or maybe it wasn’t a very long list. Otherwise I can’t really see “Xavier” for example being considered one of the blackest names. Or my daughter’s name, for that matter. All the white names seem really white though, except Cole seems pretty neutral to me.
Does anyone have the book Freakonomics to see where they’re getting this?
I don’t think of Duane as being lower class.
Get back to that stripper pole, Condoleeza, you got babies to feed.
One caveat from the owner of a creatively spelled name… I agree that we should never get upset (at least initially – I’ve had an aunt by marriage in the family for thirty years who still cannot spell my name right, but that’s a rant for another thread) when people misspell our names. Now mispronouncing it is something else entirely. If you’ve had to patiently explain how your name is pronounced repeatedly, after the twentieth time, that person is either willfully ignorant or certifiably an idiot.
I should have used a different name. I think Duane is lower class for white people but not black people. It’s one of those names that was simply rural in the early part of the century. It’s sort of morphed into a mainstream name for black people but stayed a pretty country name for white people.
What’s interesting is that thinking about this, I really think girls’ names much more often carry class implications than boys’ names. It may reflect the way there is more variety in girls’ names in general.
I legally changed my middle name to something I’m sure no one has.
If I told you what it is, I bet you would not believe that I actually had considered it as a first name. Good thing I didn’t 
Is your point that it’s possible to achieve something important for someone who has that type of name? If so, nothing I have said contradicts it. If you think I’ve said that having such a name makes it impossible, you suck at reading/making inferences.
I hate these name threads because I understand people not wanting to put their name on here (I don’t either) but then we end up with all these teasers 
I have a common name, yet quite a few people misspell it. I don’t really mind “Emilie”, since that’s the French spelling, but I’ve seen people spell my name “Emely” and “Emilly.” What?!
While I understand that you don’t want to give your child a name that will get them lost in a sea of like-named classmates, that still leaves you plenty of room for familiar names. Take a look at the top 1000 baby names for some year, and skip down about 100 places on the list. You’ll see plenty of names that you recognize right away and which everyone knows how to spell, but which are used by less than 0.2% of the male or female population. And just going through my close relatives, I found that my sister, my mother, four of my aunts, one of my uncles, and one of my grandmothers weren’t on the list at all, thus having names shared by less than 0.0304% of the population, while all still being perfectly recognizable and familiar names.