In this part of the world it was once common, if a child died, to give the next child born the same name – Dutch is flexible with regard to gender such that nearly all Dutch names have male and female variants. Though I have the impression that it was only done when the child died young, or at least that is when it comes up for people looking up their ancestors. It can cause a problem in figuring out the birth year and age of marriage/death for example.
My extended in-laws did that. I don’t know if it was a heritage tradition or not, but they lived in the hills of Virginia. There were something like 18 children born, but only 12 that lived through childhood (this was several generations ago when that was more common). Each time a child died, the next born was given “their” name. I found it creepy when learning the family tree, but no one on that side of the family bats an eye about it. They view it more as “honoring” the dead children, sort of like giving sons the same name as their father.
I can understand the tradition, but in the case in question it was a next-door neighbor calling the name of the dead child to their new, living child. It’s another matter entirely if you hand down the name as a remembrance to your own next child.
Firstly, every common name out there is bound to be repeated, so you aren’t being original anyway.
Second of all, if you are being original, the name is probably stupid, so you should be lucky that your kid will know another kid with his name.
Not sure I follow your logic there. The name is probably stupid; therefore you will be lucky, because some other kid also has a stupid name now. :dubious:
We went with a very uncommon but “real” name for our daughter. It was much more common 50 years ago and was present in both our families. We have met one other child with that name and we didn’t freak out or anything.
To your first point, what I find more perplexing than wanting a unique name is wanting a uniquely spelled but commonly pronounced name like, say, Jennyfur (hey, nobody even think of stealing that!). It does nothing to distinguish the person in spoken conversation while ensuring a lifetime of having to tell people how to spell it, correcting misspellings in official documents, etc.
Depending upon context, your second comment is incredibly ethnocentric. In my family, the three of us kids all have fairly original names for the US, but they’re all fairly common names in the countries in which they originated; I rarely run into another person with the same name as me, and my brothers just about never run into other people with their names unless we’re visiting areas with the same ethnic population as us (which is super rare).
As for “name napping”, I’m unlikely to want to choose more common names for the area I’m currently living in and I have doubts that the names I would choose are likely to be “napped” by other people in this area. I can understand being a little annoyed if you’re sharing the (as yet unborn) baby’s name while in the last few months of pregnancy and having someone who’s in the same circles deciding after they hear it that they like that name too, but I don’t necessarily see it as a reason to pick another name altogether. If it’s common enough that there are going to be more than one in your circle who really like it, it may be common enough to have a whole herd of children in your kid’s elementary school with the same name.
I attended an all girls high school for 9 & 10th grades, and out of 500 girls, 2 others had the same name as me. I transferred to much smaller, co-ed school for 11th & 12th grades, and 2 other girls in my class of 30 had my name. 10% of my high school class had my name. To make matters worse, none of us spelled it the same way. It was constantly frustrating figuring out which one of us someone was referring to, and to constantly battle to make sure that when it was put on paper, it was spelled properly.
Granted, the year of my birth, my name was Top 100 popular and the families of the other girls with my name weren’t known to us until I started attending that school, but from that point on, the idea of having a name that’s not Top 100 or even Top 200 popular in the years surrounding my potential kid’s birth has been extremely appealing.
(The idea only expanded in my mind when I worked for a company that had two employees in two separate divisions, both named Seung-Hoon Lee. I understand that Korean naming values are very different from American ones, but the value of individuality was really driven home when I saw how confusing that was.)
85% of those “baby has a bad name” snark lists are names that are not, shall we say politely, names that those of the racial majority in the U.S. would choose for their children. Name snark is appallingly ethnocentric everywhere it occurs. So you wouldn’t name your kid Shaniqua? That doesn’t make it a stupid name. I hate name snark.
Add me to the list of those who don’t think it is any big deal. Part of it is that just because someone is a friend or co-worker now doesn’t mean their child will play a significant role in your child’s life.
My daughter’s name is Clara. I think it is a lovely name, uncommon enough, but not weird. Several people have asked me if I would mind if they named their daughter Clara, but this seems like such an odd question. I don’t own the name or have any control over it. It might become wildly popular. Or a devastating hurricane might be called Clara (see 'Katrina"). Or a trampy singer might become a huge hit and be known by only her name Clara.
Just give your kid a name you like and don’t worry about it.
Being original is not necessary, however as a name is something that identifies a particular person it is useful if it is unique within your social group. It just saves having to tack additional identifiers on to the name.
I don’t know that it’s rude, exactly, to name-nap but it is weird and sometimes a little creepy. Kind of like your friend sees your new outfit and goes out and buys the exact same outfit. It just comes across as…a little off, you know? And using the same middle name too is like them getting the same outfit and wearing the exact same shoes and accessories they saw you wearing with it.
That said, my mother was surrounded by name nappers and I’m incredibly grateful. If it hadn’t been for them, I’d have been named after a romance novel heroine and a feminized version of my dad’s name, one of those names that conjures mental images of old lady librarians who look like the Wicked Witch of the East. Ick. Mom picked the name when she was pregnant with my brother (back then you didn’t know what you were getting till you got it) and told the whole family about it. She didn’t like but could deal with one of Dad’s cousins using a very, very similar name a couple years before I was born, but when another cousin used a diminutive of both names for her German Shepherd a couple months before I was born, that tore it.
Of course, when I was 6 or 7 another cousin on Dad’s side named his daughter a very similar first name to mine and a middle name that is spelled differently but pronounced the same as mine. And both sets of parents called us by the nearly identical diminutives. Think CrazyCat and CrazyBat, and them calling us Catty and Batty. Add in some relatives that enunciate like Boomhauer, and it got pretty confusing sometimes.
Seems there are more unusual baby names than ever: http://www.gnn.com/article/trend-of-unusual-baby-names-continues/931181
This sounds like a sketch off of “Seinfeld.” Oh wait a minute it was 
And George’s alternative name “Soda” was a lot better than his first choice Seven
Honestly, what would be rude about it. It’s a name for goodness. I find it quite amusing that people have so little wrong with their live they can, (as Saffy from “Ab Fab” says) go from one self induced crisis to another.
It also came upon Sex and the City. Charlotte made up a name for her prospective kid years ago and then at a baby shower a friend of theirs revealed that that was what she was naming her kid. This was treated as a huge slap in the face by the SATC girls.