My brother knew a woman named Caiman, because she was conceived on the Caiman Islands. Naming a child after the place of conception has always seemed odd to me. Is fucking in an exotic place that much of an accomplishment?
I know a little girl called Tahoe, for the same reason. I was too polite to ask “Lake or Chevy?”
When I was nursing, I worked with a student whose name was Malena, another called Candida and a third whose name was Kylie. (Kylie is a brand of incontinence bed sheet used in geriatric wards.)
I don’t think they were ever rostered together.
I also knew a Chris Coe. And I never, ever put that together until now.
My dad and his twin brother are named Gerald and Harold.
My boys are both named boring, waspy, Biblical names, as they’ve got a last name that nobody can ever spell or pronounce.
I once knew a girl named Mikea. Her father was Mike and her mother was Kea. Weird. My mother went to school with four sisters named Gorgeous, Adorable, Lovely, and Precious. Their brother was Jonathon. I always that he should have been called Starburst or something…
What a load of subjective shit dressed up as reason. What the fuck is wrong with Mackenzie on any objective basis? Puhlease don’t tell me “it’s hard to spell” unless you are prepared to explain to me how easy it is to spell Siobhan. Puhlease don’t tell me its a surname unless you are prepared to explain away the dozens of traditional first names that are also surnames.
What the fuck does “obnoxiously trendy” mean other than “I don’t like certain names”? And don’t even think of saying “they are too common” while at the same time recommending “James”.
Princh, I’ll lay you odds that by 2015 there’ll be a lot more boys named things like Tylor and Kreig in your average grade school than there will be boys named James. (Unless it’s spelled Jaymes.) After all, didn’t someone post here that last year more baby girls were named Dakota than Anne?
You seem pretty het up about all this. Do you actually disagree that it’s NOT the brightest idea ever to name your kid after a soap opera or a kase of kute kree8ivity? (Sorry about the double negatives…)
Trendy is style over substance. It’s the flavor of the moment, and looks dated years later. Tell me, do you still wear parachute pants and Members Only jackets?
And it doesn’t have to be all too common! How many times do I say it? You can be “YOOONIEEEK” without going all out. Alternative spellings? Why not Elisabeth instead of Elizabeth? Or instead of Elizabeth, Elsbeth, Lizbeth or Bethany?
Want something truly unique? Why not a Biblical name, like Noah or Miriam? Something different but still not outlandish? Sebastian. Veronica. It’s still different enough that they won’t be one of ten Sebastians or Veronicas in class, yet they’re still names that won’t get a child picked on.
How about something old-fashioned? Bring back Adelaide or Walter.
Remember-this isn’t YOUR name. It’s your child’s. He or she is the one who will live with it for the rest of his or her life.
I always loved this site and I agree with it 100%:
That’s for sure! I was chatting with a pregnant friend the other day, and she said she was looking for a name that was classic, but quite unusual. She mentioned Olivia, Emma, and Grace as possibilities. I told her she should check the SSA website, where she found those 3 “quite unusual” names were in the top 12 or so. Boy, was she surprised!
By the time these kidlets grow up, Kayla and Dalen might seem like perfectly appropriate names for supreme court justices and such. But then again, maybe not. This may be wrong, but I’d have to assume that a woman named Makeighlee was raised by idiots, and thus was at a natural disadvantage intelligence-wise. And I agree with your point that these names wear better on toddlers than adults.
Yes, a lovely biblical name like Noah…FOR A GIRL??? I can understand maybe Noam or something but why did they name her Noah? Moses or David or Joshua were’nt pretty enough for girls names. I mean Noah is an obvious boy’s name.
I just shake my head.
A poor Italian friend of mine has the middle name Attila (and the first name Andrea - he’s a guy, but Andrea, with emphasis on the E, is apparently a perfectly normal guy’s name in Italian). When he was finishing his MBA and applying for jobs, he would get rejection letters with the added indignity of having them get his gender wrong.
Oh well - at least the campus bar gave out a free drink for every rejection letter you brought in.
I have to say that this thread has amused me greatly b/c I don’t understand why people get so riled up over names until I realised that I do exactly the same thing with Indian names. Not the ubiquitous Siddarth/Rohan/Sameer/Nikhil for boys or Anjali for girls-I understand a need to make your furrin’ name easy in America and those names were standard, real names before every other transplant Desi started bestowing them on their children- but just these made-up Indian names that come out of nowhere. My cousin named her kid Shamika. My parents get Z-Tv (hides face in shame) and I routinely see the strangest names on there…“Mansha,” or “Tabu,” or stuff like that.
Me, my parents named me “Anagha,” which is an insanely archaic name bestowed almost entirely by Maharashtrians. Think the “Mildred,” of Indian baby-names. Oh well-I have a nickname and they seem to like it and I like being one of very few Anaghas.
I meant for a boy.
I know but I was referring to a baby girl I saw at a housewarming party last weekend. I’m not used to obvious boy’s names, biblical or not, given to girls.
I’ll grant you that this is true, but I have serious reservations that this was what the mother intended. Stonebow, though, didn’t relay any of the really good ones. I work in an elementary school, and I see a bizarre collection of names every year:
Passion
Generica
D’Van’Té (pronounced dEE-vahn-tay)
Key’evan (pronounced Kevin)
and, my favorite because I love parents who have liked the sound of a name, but can’t be arsed to find the spelling of it before they write something on a birth certificate:
Teria (pronounced Tiara) This name has almost driven me to distraction. I have threatened to give a phonics lesson of how /Tee-air-uh/ can not be achieved by the spelling of Teria.
Better clarify this before someone assumes I am evil*. I have made this threat out of exasperation in the presence of only my husband in the privacy of my own home without any intent to ever do such a thing.**
*more evil than normal
** I think that’s the most prepositional phrases I have ever used in a sentence.
Girls in Israel are sometimes given the name Noa. (IIRC, Hebrew pronunciation for Noah (m.) is more like “Noach,” with a guttural at the end.)
Once you do, I’d like to see you try and explain English family names like Cholmondeley (pron. “CHUMley”), Dalziel (pron. “deeELL”), and Featherstonehaugh (pron. basically however the hell you want to EXCEPT how it looks).
How could there be an objective basis for a preference? Can you objectively justify your love of your favorite flavor of ice cream? I mean, if you can’t justify it objectively, you don’t really have any right to prefer it, just like I have no right to prefer certain names over others.
By the way, “please” doesn’t have a U or an H.
Mackenzie sounds unfeminine to me. It’s extremely trendy at the moment. I don’t like the idea of giving a child a name that will instantly mark the time of her birth; to me, traditional names evoke feelings and resonate in a way that made-up names don’t. I don’t like the idea of giving the kid a “flavor of the week” sorta name - you can throw out your old Hootie and the Blowfish cds once they start feeling silly and dated, but the name you stick on your kid will likely be there for the rest of their life. They age, for me, the way catchphrases from TV shows age: cute once or twice, but embarrassing and idiotic after a few weeks.
“Obnoxiously trendy” doesn’t mean “too common”. It means “flash in the pan”. They would be simply pretentious if they were rare - “Mackenzie” sounds like the name of a soap opera character. Except that once they get picked up by the suburban SUV crowd, they sprout like mushrooms after a rainstorm and don’t stick around for much longer. These sorts of names seem sorta pathetic to me because they seem like a sad attempt to sound refined that fails when three other kids on the same block have the same name. They lack both the dignity that a traditional name bears from its association with historical figures or Biblical characters, but they also show an inability to come up with something unique or particularly fitting for the child. “Mackenzie” is too common to be interesting or unique, and too new to have any gravitas or dignity associated with it. And, in my opinion, most of the trendy names of the moment simply sound ugly. “Kayla” sounds like baby-talk. “Mackenzie” sounds like a Scottish guy in a kilt (not that they don’t have their own charm, mind you.) “Kaitlyn” sounds hyperfeminine and twee - it just doesn’t evoke the kinds of things I’d hope my daughter grows up to be.
Well, that explains Worcestershire. It’s just “worshter”, or something like that, isn’t it?