I was a pre-ultrasound baby, and everyone was convinced Mom was carrying a boy. I would have been Joseph Eli Wells III. Mom hadn’t even picked out a girls name! She had always liked the the name she ended up using for my first name, and there was a box of Kimberly-Clark tissue in the room - so I ended up with the middle name Kimberly.
And no offence intended, but I would never have guessed it was pronounced “Connor”. I imagine he’s going to hear that a lot in his life.
You might like a weird spelling, but you’re not the poor sod who will have a lifetime of correcting people.
My surname is reasonably uncommon, but not very rare. It also has the potential to be spelled four or five different ways (two of which are real surnames) and even to be hyphenated (it isn’t). Every. Single. Time. I tell somebody my surname at a bank or somewhere, I have to spell it out and tell them it’s one word with no hyphen. It is a pain in the arse. Unfortunately, being my surname, there is nothing I can do about it, but it’s certainly taught me that I would never inflict a given name like that on some poor kid.
Ok, first of all I didn’t take issue with anything. Second, I’ve managed to hijack the thread so far.
Sorry guys, can we get back to surprise gender babies?
I was figuring the Caugh part would rhyme with cough, therefore Koff-ner. Or I thought Kog-ner. But Con-ner wasn’t even on my radar! I wasn’t looking at it as being pronounced like the first part of Caugh-t. Ah well. I’ve been spelling my name to people for 50 years, and it’s only the -y instead of -ie variation of a really common name!
Actually, since he doesn’t like the name connor either, and goes by Niq, he won’t ever have issues with the spelling. Part of the joy of having 3 names from which to choose.
TheLoadedDog, actually, my first name is spelled a little odd, I have had to correct people my whole life. It isn’t even that bad – the name commonly has an “e” on the end, mine doesn’t. I decided at a very early age that I didn’t like that name (for reasons other than spelling) and started going by my middle name. Also a very common name, and it’s spelled exactly how it sounds, yet people always insist on adding an “h” or an “e” to it.
Back to the OP – a coworker just went into labor on Wednesday. She had planned for a girl. Either Noah is now a good name for girls or she was mistaken. She told me that her ultrasound showed a girl – mistakes are still made. And, yeh, caugh as in caught 
Either I was pre-ultrasound, or my parents didn’t ask for the gender, buuuut… my great-grandmother had a vision that I was going to be a boy!
This girl grew up in a blue room, sleeping under a blue quilt. Thank you.
PS to Litoris: it’s spelled Raymond Luxury Yacht, but it’s pronounced Throat Warbler Mangrove
At least he likes one of the names. When my son was in kindergarden he wanted everyone to call him Mike. No idea where that came from.
I used to hang out on a baby/parenting site, and I remember one girl bringing home a baby boy after three ultrasounds that said they were expecting a girl (Oooh! Holy blow to the male ego, Batman!).
From the same place, I know another girl who had baby names picked out early in the pregnancy and started referring to the baby by the girl’s name from the time she found out the gender (20 weeks or so) - but when the child was born, she took one look at her and said she realised the child’s name was Sarah, she couldn’t possibly be called anything else, and that’s all there was to it. The original name was top of her list for Child 2, but she had a boy that time so she never did use it.
Finally, I know in real life (yes! incredible as it may seem) a child named Finn whose middle names were altered when someone pointed out to the new parents that his initials were FATM. To spare him a lifetime of Fat/Finn jokes, the middle name beginning with T was dropped (the A was in honor of a grandparent and couldn’t be revoked).
Engraving before the child is born just seems like asking for trouble!
For some reason, my brother was supposed to be a girl (although I think we were pre-u/s at that point), so growing up, anytime I got pissed at him, I referred to him as “Heather Marie” :D.
I’ve known a couple of people who were told they were having a girl, and ended up with a boy - a friend who’s an ultrasound tech said that’s more common than being told it’s a boy and having a girl. Last year, I did have a friend told she was having a boy at her first ultrasound, only to find out she was having a girl three weeks later at another ultrasound. Thank goodness she did have more than one ultrasound.
I was convinced we were having a girl, but Baby B surprised us - we didn’t even need the tech to tell us he was a boy, we saw his penis in full glory before she even said a word. He’s still a bit of an exhibitionist.
E.
Not a gender mistake, but my husband’s neice was supposed to be Sarah. We were even told by his parents that she was Sarah after she was born. We didn’t know that their source was her 20 mos. old brother. No engraving, thank goodness, but my husband left his brother a touching voicemail welcoming little Sarah to the family. She’s actually Katrina.
I have an engraved silver cup with my name totally wrong on it. It’s written as Kayla (not Kyla) Dadslatsname. Yes, I intentionally misspelled that, because my dad’s last name is spelled wrong on it too. Besides, my last name is hyphenated: momslastname-dadslastname. I was at least a teenager before certain members of my family chose to acknowledge that that’s my actual last name and my mom’s last name is NOT my middle name. The weirdest part is that all of these relatives are on my mom’s side of the family - it’s not like they couldn’t remember how to spell it or something.
The same relative had a silver cup engraved for my sister Rachel, too. Spelled Rachael. Is it really so hard to double-check the birth announcement before having the name engraved on something? Geez. (My sister’s another baby who had her planned name changed at the last moment, so another vote against engraving before the name is actually written on the birth certificate.)
Y’know what’d really be a hoot? If she was red-green colourblind. 
Yeah, my parents wanted to be surprised, and so my room as a baby was yellow. 
All three of the names you saddled that poor kid with are still freaking atrocities. “Niq” is bad enough. “Caughner” is a crime against humanity. You did realize this was a child you were naming, not a cat, don’t you? Good God, It would be better for the kid to go through life with a hump on his back than to be named “Aedin Caughner Niquolos.” Why would you inflict that on your own flesh and blood? Those spellings don’t make you sound clever or creative, just unbelievably precious and impractical. Asking for people to actually memorize those spellings and get them right is more of an imposition than a rational or justified expectation. I have doubts as to whether I could force myself to use those kinds of spellings with any grandkids of my own. If one of my kids ever names their own kid “Niquolos,” I’m calling the kid “Nick,” no matter how many times I get “corrected.”
Diogenes the Cynic, bear in mind this kid is being raised in the SMS generation. Odds are he’ll be functionally illiterate, think that ‘u’ is a suitable substitute for ‘you’, and confuse words (‘to’) with numbers.
I think a little thing like being called ‘Eden Corner Tequila’ is probably the least of his problems.
And it could have been worse. Remember he was very nearly Red Green* (unspecified colour):
*A combination which is forever linked to the punchline ‘a frog in a blender’.
When yer right, yer right.
Out of curiosity, Litoris, are you aware that for most speakers of American English, “caugh as in caught” isn’t actually the first syllable in “Connor”? If you speak a variety of English that distinguishes the vowels in (say) “Don” and “Dawn”, like most Americans, then “caught” has a different vowel than “Connor”. And as far as I can think of that vowel doesn’t appear in any words spelled with “augh”. The closest possible pronunciation of the name under the spelling you chose is “Cawner”, which doesn’t sound the same as “Connor” the way a lot of us pronounce them. (For that matter, using “qu” in “Niquolos” to represent a /k/ sound is a little odd as well.)
Did you pick those spellings under the reasoning that they would help distinguish him from the other kids whose parents gave him the same ultra-trendy names? Because it’ll still be confusing when his teachers have to refer to him as “Aeden X.” to distinguish him from “Aiden R.” and “Aydin Z.” and “Aidon Q.” (Same goes with “Nick” or “Connor”.) Wouldn’t it have been easier just to pick something a bit less trendy than “Aiden” or “Connor” or “Nicholas”?
I suppose it’s something I just won’t ever understand. My parents also saddled me with a name that I always have to spell out for people. It’s far from the biggest reason I have to be irritated with my parents, but I just don’t understand why you’d want to express your creativity or whatever by misspelling your child’s name – they’re going to have it for life, you know.
The first one we adopted. We could have picked boy or girl, didn’t pick - which meant we had an over 90% chance of getting a boy (there were waiting lists for girls and boys available when we went through the process). Got a referral for a boy, picked up same boy three months later at the airport.
Second one we had an ultrasound which was inconclusive. A second ultrasound showed girl. I said to the OB “girl, as it ‘think its a girl, but don’t paint the nursery pink?’”
The OB said “if you paint the nursery pink and this one comes out a boy, I’ll come over and repaint it for you.” It was a girl.
We changed our mind on our daughter’s name, seven months before she was born. Spelling is a known, but less common variant (and she goes by a known, but uncommon nickname) - so anyone engraving had a good chance of misspelling the name.
But people get to do what they want to do. They are paying, you are just following through. Be thankful its just crap and you aren’t a tatoo artist inking “Megan” on some guy’s bicep for a women who is going to dump him in three months.
Yeah, I thought ‘Cawner’ too. And while I must echo the sentiment ‘It’s a human being you’ve just saddled with that’, to each their own. I think we’ve made a fine enough point of the matter and we shall now move on.
This thread has me thinking; my aunt is pregnant, supposedly with a boy…or is she? Fortunately, she only tells close family the gender and no one the name until the baby is born (at least, she did that with her first/last set of twins)
Stef-with-an-F. I said ‘F’, you moron! Not a ‘ph’! Beats
“Conner” is actually an anglicisation of the Irish name “Conor”, which spelling is actually a simplification of the original spelling “Conchobhar” (meaning wolf lover apparently).
“Caughner”, therefore, is actually quite similar in bizarrenes (to our eyes, not those of the name’s originating language) to the original spelling.
As for “Aedin” - same story. A bastardization of “Aidan” I presume, which is an anglicisation of the Irish “Aodhán”.
I don’t understand anyone wanting to re-complexify the spelling of proud and honorable names that have been deliberately simplified over the centuries, but each to their own I guess. Just don’t be surprised if they get misspelled. For ever.
Conchobhar! Now that’s a name I’d be proud to have!