I’m pretty sure the last time we had a thread on this subject, someone pointed out that “Shithead” (pronounced something like Shi-theed) is actually quite a common Indian (?) name.
dancefan: Two weeks ago we had a little girl come in named Veijana. Someone else got to call her name in the lobby.
You mean, you wouldn’t want to call out a name like “Veijana” (pronounced, I’m guessing, “Vay-john-a”) because it sounds too much like “vagina” (“vuh-jine-a”)? I think your delicacy is a bit overstretched here. Suppose you had to call out a more widely recognized name like “Regina” (usually “Ruh-jine-a”) or, heaven forbid, “Dick”?
SV: I’m pretty sure the last time we had a thread on this subject, someone pointed out that “Shithead” (pronounced something like Shi-theed) is actually quite a common Indian (?) name.
I’m still skeptical about that. There certainly is a (South Asian) Indian name “Shitha” (pronounced more or less “Shih-tha” or “Shee-tha”), but I can’t figure out a variant that would produce “Shithead”. I’m guessing that some non-Indian wiseacre saw the name “Shitha” and thought “hey, that looks kind of like ‘shithead’, huh-uh, huh-uh”, and the legend grew from there.
Well, my best friend in high school once was friends with an Indian girl named Shahtol, or something like that. (Everyone called her "shit-all.)
That’s my Hebrew name.
Um…spoilers, people? I just started on the third season of Buffy…wasn’t expecting to run across spoilers in an unrelated thread!
Isn’t this a variant of hydrangea? I think I have two planted to the side of my front porch.
I used to work as a raft guide, and one of my co-workers was a Yael. I had no problem pronouncing it, as one of my Hebrew school teachers was named Yael, so I was used to it. But I was absolutely floored at how many people just could not pronounce the name. Yael would have a raft full of people every day who called her Yale, or repeatedly asked the other guides how to pronounce her name, or as you say, just avoided saying it at all. Even most of the people she worked with every day couldn’t get it right.
She was a good sport about it, but one day, she just got really annoyed, and started stomping around the raft barn yelling “Ya El! Ya El! What’s so hard about it!? Ya El! Ya El! YA EL!!!”
It was pretty funny to see, but I definitely felt for her. It must be very frustrating to have to deal with that all that time.
It’s unfortunate that some “foreign” names don’t work so well in English, but what are you going to do, right? But why you would pull a hard-to-pronounce and weirdly spelled name out of thin air and inflict it on a kid, I’ll never know. The Yaels of the world have some frustrations, but at least it’s a perfectly normal Hebrew name, and Yael can simply explain that to anyone who asks about her “unusual” name. What’s Keh’Vohnne going to do? Simply explain that his mommy is a moron?
Alon? Oh crap, I’d spelt it Elan - but in my defence, I was using a baby name book. (Wolfie has four names, and Elan was one of the Hebrew ones - figured he should be named for a tree like his momma).
No, that’s fine. Elan is an alternative spelling for Ilan, which means tree.
Alon, IIRC means oak tree.
There is another tree name which is a girl’s name - Tamar.
A lot of Hebrew names are taken from nature - including my own. Aside from the ones mention above there are:
Boys’ names
Zev - wolf
Ari - lion
Dov - bear
Tzvi - deer
(Just for the record, my name is Zev Ari and my father’s is Tzvi Dov)
Girls’ names
Devora - bee
Rachel - ewe
Tzivya - deer
Tamar - date (Mnemonic: Judah took Tamar on a date…)
… and probably many others that I can’t think of off the top of my head.
Zev Steinhardt
I just watched Fiddler on the Roof yesterday and I thought the old shtetl names were very pretty–Tzeitel, Chava, Hodel, Golde.
Ah … that makes sense. But I’m glad to hear that Alon is different - maybe we can name the kid that. 
Zev - yep - I recognize a number of those names in my family tree … huh.
Yep, she’s a flower and The Velvet Underground and Nico is my all-time favorite band, so it’s kind of a combination.
A weird thing about Nico Blue is that the late singer for Blind Melon also named his daughter that and it was right around the same time my daughter was born. Just when we thought we gave her a name that no one else would have!
I’ve tossed around Chava for a daughter - I fell in love with the name after watching Fiddler for the first time on Broadway. However, my husband thinks it will sound a little odd to have such an obviously Jewish name with our very obviously German surname - especially since we aren’t Jewish. However, I was in love with Ava for a daughter until it grew so popular, which is why I think Chava appealed to me aside from the fact that it’s a beautiful name in it’s own right.
As it is, when we do decide to take the plunge into parenthood, we both like Miranda Katharine for a daughter and Malcolm Leo for a son.
E.
Just to add to the examples of mis-named children:
My daughter (who attends an Orthodox Jewish yeshiva) has a classmate who has one parent who is an immigrant from Russia and another who came from Israel. They wanted to give their daughter a name that was “American” and yet sounded somewhat “Israeli.”
Her name: Natalie :smack:
Zev Steinhardt
You’d hope they at least spelt it right (Cayman)…
Perhaps she’s named for her mother’s creepy, reptilian skin? 
Huh? Natali is a fairly common Israeli name; I’ve known quite a few Natalis, including two in my 8th-grade class. I’m not sure it has a deeper Hebrew meaning - it could be a female variation on Natan, or perhaps from the N-T-A’ root (“to plant”) - but it certainly exists.
In fact, it’s almost as common as Yael.
Is this what Zev’s talking about?
Nevertheless.