By the way I think “Rune” is an interesting first name, though it does sound distinctly European ( Germanic ) and probably would be regarded as unusual in the U.S. .
'course the same could be said for me - my real first name is Nikola, which I disliked until I was in my teens, so I really am the pot calling the kettle black when commenting on the unusual names of other folks :).
Actually, Nikola is quite cool. Puts me in mind of Nicola Tesla. And, you were probably called Nick growing up, so what’s bad about that? Nick’s the kinda guy you can trust. Nick’s your buddy. Nick’s the kinda guy you drink beers with. The kinda guy that doesn’t care if you puke in his car. Nick.
(I think I posted this on a similar thread a while back)
I once knew two twin girls named Mary Margaret and Margaret Mary.
Also, I met a woman who named her son Tigger (yes, she was young).
Another lady I met, who was pregnant, had a son who was rallying hard to name the new baby Fireball. I don’t think she took his advice.
Possibley the worst name I’ve run across was a girl in my daughter’s class named Melena. I guess it Sounds nice, unless you know it means the black, tarry stool passed with gastrointestinal bleeding.
So I think now. When I was a kid I wanted to be “Scott”, after my maternal uncle :D. That was originally going to be my middle name, but they dropped the idea as it didn’t work well with the rest of my very Serb name ( Serbs, at least in my father’s family, traditionally don’t have middle names, so neither do I ).
Nikola Tesla, thank you ;). My standing example when I explain my name to folks.
I was and am and yeah, everything but the last. Please vomit out the window if you can or tell me so I can pull over :p.
Our family is full of unusual names, although none of them are absurd, we have:
Lola Mae
Kitrel Jay
Alva Lee
Adrienne Dawn (me)
Aaron Lee Jackson
Markes Paul
Letha Kathryn (after a great-grandmother)
and the best one of all…
Nico Blue (my daughter)
Still, I don’t think any of them are terrible or anything, just not your average names. I used to hate mine, but as I’ve gotten older I really appreciate having something distinctive.
Although, my mom says I’m not allowed to make fun of names since I named my daughter Nico. I don’t care though, I think it’s beautiful.
Canvas since you made false accusations against me (claiming I’m calling another poster a liar), I hardly think you’re in a position to dictate courteous behavior to anyone.
sequence again, since you keep shifting:
you quoted someone’s post wrt ‘someone they knew, knew some one who did’. I said “sounds like an urban legend” to me.
you accuse me (falsely) of saying the person was lying.
I post the page from Snopes that details very specifically exactly what the poster had posted.
you again (falsely) tell me that I’ve called this poster a liar.
and I take offense. Why the audacity of me!
now, you tell me that either I called them a liar or stupid.
Odd, I don’t recall using either word. (Scans up) nope, never did.
that’s three times you’ve shoved wrong, accusatory words into my mouth.
Think I’ll be happier about it now?
There are, of course, other alternatives to merely believing that the person was lying or stupid. They may have simply not thought about it much, only repeated something they heard, didn’t analyze it, etc etc etc. I don’t tell folks they’re stupid for believing or repeating an urban legend as if it were true.
However, when some onedoes repeat an urban legend as if it were true, and especially on a message board devoted to eradicating ignorance, our alternatives are:
leave it alone, gosh, nobody gets hurt when urban legends continue to be spread.
point it out.
I chose to point it out, without the editorializing you attached to me. My first attempt at pointing it out was met with your insulting accusation, to which I responded “spare me”, pointing it out again a bit less politely. Since then you’ve repeated and expanded your accusations against me.
all to avoid admitting that you didn’t notice an urban legend when you tripped over it. More than once.
it’s taking longer than we thought, indeed.
Oh yeah, and I read recently that Jermaine Jackson named his daughter Jermajesty! Now, come on, that is truly bad.
Nastasia is simply a diminutive or pet name for Anastasia. It would probably be more popular in Slavic countries.
catsix-that would be funny…if it weren’t true. I’ve heard of people naming their littles “Dallas” and “Paris” after the place where the child was conceived.
You should check out some of the threads at BabyCenter.com. One woman has a son named, I shit you not, Senator John. And then, when people joked about his brother being named Congressman or something, she went all apeshit.
Hi, wring! We’ve never met, but let me assure you that the the incident I mentioned really did happen. (BTW, this happened to a long-time friend of mine who would not claim that an Urban Legend happened to him personally. FTR, I would also not claim that a UL had “really happened to this guy I know!”)
Obviously, it’s a coincidence. (And it happened many, many years ago.)
Geez, my post was an aside in the first place. I just threw it in there because I thought it was funny. I didn’t even realize there was a Snopes article on it.
You know, you try to make your posts interesting/funny, you start threads only to see them die… and it’s a throw-away post that creates all the buzz!
Many, many (way too damn many) moons ago, the very first paying job I ever held was as a night clerk for the Texas Department of Public Safety in the Driver’s License division. This was pre-computer, manual files.
I encountered some of the wierdest names. I found more than one person with a first name of T9C. Yes, the name included a number. I guess they were trying to spell the slang word pronounced tee-nine-cee or something.
And I found a black person with a first name of Precious-Blue-Eyes. Think about it for a moment.
I find this interesting. According to the Social Security Admin, Madison was the 3rd most popular name in 2003, 2nd in 2002, among the top 10 since 1997,
but 112 in 1992.
I obviously do not know how old your daughter is. But either
(a) she is older than, say, 12, in which case many people observed the same as you did, named their daughter Madison, and there you go - lots of Madisons around.
or
(b) She is younger. This means that even though the name is popular, it seems that the perceived chance that you have several Madisons in a neighborhood is fairly small[1]. The SSA numbere support this: the number one boy name (Jacob) and girl name (Emily) only represent 1.8% and 1.7% of the kids with the top 1,000 names, respectively
Overall, to come to the topic, I don’t care about the “made-up” names. I do think that parents who name their kids after celebreties are lazy. Pit them, and hail to those who think that a name is important. Most of us are stuck with it for a lifetime.
Oh, and “Billy” is 400 or so among the top 1000. So you are more likely to have a few Madisons than a few Billies in your class in 10 years…
Dorfl
[1] great extrapolation from one datapoint there
I don’t doubt that. as I pointed out later, I also had a coworker who said ‘my cousin blah blah blah’. However, I also believe that if we tracked down my coworker’s cousin, they would say “no, it wasn’t me, it was my coworker” and the coworker would say it was their cousin and so on. Jan Van whatever (the author of all those Urban legends books) tracked many of 'em down. Friend Of a Friend. It’s a common communicational tool, but often gets played out in urban legends.
I may tell you my brother had an experience. To save me the trouble to explain that it wasn’t my brother, per se, but really an old family friend, who was like a brother to me, and that he didn’t really claim it’d happened to him, it was to a friend of his. So, since I believe my friend, who believed his friend, I shorten that verbal trip up to “my brother”. and if it was a case of something that actually happened to that person, no harm, no foul, ya know? except that unbeknownst to us, the friend of the friend had done the same thing. Only that person had read about it in a magazine somewhere at their doctors office.
and so on.
so, in short - I never claimed you or your friend were lying. just that I think it’s damned likely that if we tracked it back, we’d find the FoaF routine.
so these days, I don’t choose to tell people on a message board that my former coworker’s cousin had worked w/a family who’d named their kids lemonjello and orangejello, since I think it’s damned unlikely that it really happened (except of course for the cases where someone decides to ‘try out’ IRL an urban legend by putting a baby in a microwave, for example).
Okee-doke. But Robert (my friend) and I did have the discussion of how he tried to subtly suggest other names, expressed reservations, tried to send the message that this was not the best name, until finally he had to explain what chlamydia was. (Now, the spelling is something I just came up with. I have no idea how the mother-to-be wanted to spell it.)
(BTW, I know LOTS of people who should know better that don’t know what chlamydia is, either. Never heard of it. Yipes!)
Anyhoo, that’s all I have to say about that.
Carry on!
And let us not forget Picabo Street. Gotta love a child named after a game you play with puppies, kitties and babies.
It’s not as uncommon as you think. I had a neighbor once who had blue eyes - his family was cajan. Apparently many black cajans have non-brown eyes.
When I had my baby (in Texas) I was told that the ONLY thing I couldn’t use was numeric numbers (Six is ok but 6 is not) and/or symbols (such as %). Everything else was ok.
I asked the lady, “Even if I picked CaCa PooPoo PeePee??”
She said nothing,but nothing, would surprise her any more.
As I suspected niblet, sorry I forgot what your username was. Some of us realize that yes, people really can be thatstupid.
Oh, and wring? You can fancy it up all you want, when you refute what a person has said as not being accurate…or as you said in your last post that they didn’t really know what they were talking about…
A rose by any other name.
No. It’s wrong that you would consider giving your child the third most popular female name at the moment. It’s wrong that you’d give your child an obnoxiously trendy name. How about “James” instead? James is an excellent name, and most Jameses that I’ve known have been pretty hot. (“Jimmy”, however, sounds a little hick to me.) James Madison, by the way, is one of my favorite presidents, and I’m firmly convinced he’s the most underrated. Why the fuck isn’t the architect of the Constitution on any of our money?
And this brings me to the problem. Parents get the notion into their head that because a name wasn’t popular in their own generation, it must be unpopular now as well, even though they seem to do it all at the same time.
Um, because it ends up being a justification for naming the child “Kayleigh”? Unfortunately, the names that sound good to a mother in the glow of oxytocin after a pregnancy tend to be disgustingly cute. And the spellings are worse. Hence the Madycynnes and Keighlahs. I suspect these names doom the kid to a lifetime of obscurity, since it’d be damn hard to take a person named Kayla seriously. Maybe that’ll change, but most of the names that are trendy right now, especially for girls, are rather infantile-sounding. I personally have an immense dislike for the now-common trope of giving the kid a diminutive instead of a real name - it means that if the kid wants to become a trial lawyer or something, she’ll have to change her name. At least with a serious-sounding name, she can always come up with a nickname.
Names like that aren’t white trash - they’re yuppie. Slightly more distasteful, really.
What about the ones that are both nontraditional AND obnoxiously trendy? Aren’t we all over “Kaitlyn” by now? Most of the “nontraditional” names people are giving their children are either very common all of the sudden or else part of trendy categories, like “Obnoxiously misspelled Irish names used by families to commemorate their 1/256th Irish ancestry”.
It’s great to name your kid something slightly unusual. But it’s not the appropriate outlet for every ounce of creativity in your body, nor is it the time to express your admiration for your favorite soap star. Chances are, it’ll be stuck on the kid for life, so give them a name that’s not irritating, or cutesy, or incredibly common, or impossible to pronounce. After all, you’re not the one who has to spend their life named Mackenzie.
As I explained before-I personally don’t know any Madison’s. YES I know it’s a very popular name. We live in a very rural area, so it’s possible she could have another one in her class, but I highly doubt it will be full of them.
I dislike my name (think Davinci painting). I wish I had a more common name, but I don’t. If my daughter grows up to dislike her name, what can I do? How am I supposed to know when she’s born what name will appeal to her when she’s old enough to care?
I pit parents who have such a pathetically weak sense of “uniqueness” that they give a baby the same “unique” name (or close to it) as given to 3,000,000 other “unique” babies. If this isn’t a good argument for the existence of a collective unconscious, what is?
My big beef with the trendy names of today is that a lot of them seem to come from an unawareness that the child will ever grow up and be anything but (F) sugar and spice and everything nice or (M) snips and snails and puppy dog tails. At least an old-gold name like Laura or Daniel is appropriate at any age. The new names (hell, a lot of names from the 1980s and 90s as well!) have this daytime-serial, Toys ‘R’ Us feel to them. Purple and pink princesses with rhinestones in their hair and white icing on their shoes. Little tawny warrior-lords in animal skins on someone else’s quest for the holy grail.
I guess I pit a lot of people’s half-understood dreams for their little ones. Shameful of me, I know… 
