telekinetic

I see a recent discussion on good boy's names, and thought that, rather than jacking that thread with my propaganda, I'd start another one. I have very strong opinions on the topic of naming children, which can be boiled down to three rules:

1. It must have one correct unambiguous pronunciation, obvious at a glance when read
2. It must have (and use) a unambiguously correct spelling, obvious immediately when heard
3. It must not be in the top N (10/20/50/100) names on the SSN registry for the most recent year

I may have espoused these sentiments previously, but I feel like I should clarify them and add to some of the reasoning behind these rules.

Rule 1: Pronunciation.
Good: David, Janet, Caesar, Apple
Bad: Garolde, Nevaeh, Maciej, Anja, Abcde
Edge case: Jacqueline (jak-leen, jak-lin, jak-uh-lin)

What you name your child will stick with them their whole lives (unless it is positively wretched, in which case they will shed it immediately). They will have a lifetime of people reading their name off Chipotle receipts, roll sheets, doctor's office clipboards and diplomas. Preapply some permanent lubricant to these situations and save them from having to pipe up a thousand times over their life "It's pronounced Harold, like it had an H, and with a silent E"

Rule 2: Spelling
Good: Michael, Jackson, Destiny, Emily
Bad: Mykal, Jaxon, Destyneigh, Emmalee

Giving your offspring the name "Jaxon" is effectively the same thing as giving him the name "Jackson, with an X, Jay-ay-eks-oh-en"--which you must admit is a bit unwieldy. An unfortunate trend with my generation is to be 'creative' with your children's name...which the uncreative interpret as "take a normal name, butcher the spelling to be 'cute', insist on original pronunciation". I am ALL for creative names (which my next point will address) but misspelling your child's name is NOT the best outlet.

Rule 3: Commonality

Good: Felicity, Alfred, Rory, Scarlet
Bad: Isabella, Olivia, Jacob, Ethan

In the US, Popular baby names should be your bible for this one. It lists the top 1000 names by year. The goal here is to keep there from being multiples of your chosen name in your darling offspring's classes/workplace/reality show appearances, to avoid having to be the dreaded "Mike S." Practically, if you stay out of the top 50 or so, your offspring is unlikely to run into their doppelgangers with any sort of regularity. The names I listed in the 'good' row are all less common than the top 700, while the 'bad' are the 1&2 boy and girl for 2009. You can make this a non-issue by picking something totally unique and non-namelike, AS LONG AS it meets rules 1 & 2--Apple is an example I used earlier, but a more out-there example is Penn Jillette naming his daughter Moxie, for the reason that she'll always know she's being addressed when she hears it.

These three rules are open for discussion, and the world won't end if you really want to name your daughter Kayleigh after her greatgrandmother, but I'd love to hear any other rules or guidelines you might have. If you are in the process of naming a child, I beg you to at least CONSIDER the reasons behind these before you saddle your most precious posession with a lifetime of saying "with a y!"

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Cimarron29414

What an interesting thread! Wifey and I are not trying to stop a pregnancy anymore. If a girl, wifey is considering "Rohan..." as the given name. While I like the name, it's that damned "h", it's supposed to be soft, but you know that everyone is going to say "Row-han" instead of "Row-en." If this thread progresses nicely, I'll show it to wifey.

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"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

Slims

There was a great chapter in Freakonomics on naming.

Stephen Levitt makes the argument that names are both somewhat predictive of a childs future potential as well as partly causal.

For instance:

A child who is named Lemon Jello is probably not going to come from wealthy, educated parents nor will he likely attend an ivy league university. That is the predictive aspect as naming conventions tend to very between various classes/groups of people.

He also makes the case that Lemon Jello may have a bit more trouble finding success in life simply because of his name, regardless of his background, education, etc.

For an example he provides a company representative reviewing hundreds of resumes for a few job opportunities. That employee will only spend a few seconds examining each resume, on average. Which means that the employees personal opinions, prejudices, etc. will play a role (conscious or otherwise) in the selection process and will likely set down Lemon Jello's resume after reading the name. Right or wrong that reviewer has likely made a gut-opinion about Lemon Jello's upbringing and odds of adapting to the corporate culture based solely on a name....And he is probably right.

Parents who name their children off the wall stupid-shit are stamping them with a giant 'I come from a shitty home' label that will follow them for the rest of their lives.

Likewise, names that are currently considered 'sophisticated,' regardless of any truth behind the opinion, are more likely to get a positive response from people.

The big killers:

Nicknames as given names: Greg instead of Gregory
Mispellings and/or hyphens: G-reg, Dennyz, etc.
Brand names, etc: Porsche, LemonJello, etc.
Made up names: Gregoranicanmeus
Dumb Capitalizations: GreGoRy
Etc.

I can't imagine handicapping my child with a demonstrably hurtful name and I think poorly of parents who do....If you can't be bothered to research naming conventions before naming your child then you are not likely to make good judgment calls regarding other aspects of their future.


I feel so strongly about this because I have met Lemonjello as well as his brother Orangejello.

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noodle

AVOID Neveah at all costs.
Or anything spelled backwards.
It's just dumb.

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ASU2003

This is one thing I have big problems with when taken to the extreme to be different, even though I got lucky I can't imagine what some of these kids will face.

It got bad enough in New Zealand that a judge had to step in and have the parents come up with another name for their kids.
Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii, 4Real, Number 16 Bus Shelter, Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Twisty Poi, and Sex Fruit aren't names.
NZ judge backs girl over 'embarrassing' name - CNN

Now, some were banned that I think were ok like Stallion, but I would think that parents would want the best for their kids and forcing them to have a name that people are going to mispronounce, mis-spell, or laugh at is wrong. And don't get me started on giving girl names to boys and boy names to girls... Parents should know better.

Sex, Screaming and the Importance of Names :: Isabella Snow: Smut in G minor

And parents really don't want to consider how 'screamable' a name is during sex, but I would factor that into it.

levite

In general, I very much agree with all of this. For us, there's a competing factor, though, which is that observant Jews tend to want to give our kids Jewish names, so the trick is to try and find something Biblical or Rabbinic that is pronounceable in English, sounds gender appropriate, but is original enough that 1/3 of the entire Jewish people doesn't end up being named David.

I would assume folks from other cultures have similar issues that they deal with.

Having myself been named by Orthodox parents who presumed that it would be okay to give me an untranslatable Hebrew name, because it didn't contain any sounds not made in English, and besides, I'd always be in an Orthodox community anyway (big fail. Haven't been Orthodox since I was 13. My mom's not Orthodox anymore either)...I can tell you it is no picnic. Now, since I got older, and began to care less that strangers inevitably mangle my name, or assign it to the wrong gender, I have been happy because it means something nice in Hebrew. But it was murder in childhood. Not happy. Not at all.

Personally, I like a lot of our traditional names. Mrs. Levite and I are now starting to try to have kids, and we've been tossing around names like Jeremy, Zachary, Elijah, Shoshanah, Tamara, and Keturah....

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Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.

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filtherton

We named one of our kids after a greek letter and the other's name means lion. Each name has significance to us, lots of nice nickname potential and they are both fairly unique.

That said, I originally wanted to name the kids after dead physicists and mathematicians, a la Feynman, Sadi or Pascal. Gauss was a little too much.

I guess my rules aligned with yours tele (though we kind of botched #1 with one kid), with the exception of #3. I don't know that we got that systematic about finding unique names.

telekinetic

We have written our favorite name, Jacqueline, off for the 1-2 punch of being too hard to spell and having multiple common pronunciations. So sad!

Are you kidding? No matter how, er, 'friendly' children end up being, with the most vocal crowd, I have a hard time believing that any person's name will be screamed in orgasmic glee more often than a parent will have to yell it over the course of childhood! I rejected the name Alice for the reason that my surname starts with a sibilant S, and doesn't flow well when yelled.
Shoshanah and Keturah might be a stretch for people to spell, but if the significance is great enough, at least they aren't spelled *wrong*, and the others meet all of my rules nicely! I see no problem!

---------- Post added at 07:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:42 PM ----------

I am trying to talk my wife into Antimony for the second one...to her credit, she said "We might as well name her Strontium!"...I'll still try to talk her into it, though

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Fotzlid

This thread reminds me of a scene in an episode of ER.

Nurse in triage with a mother and daughter.
Mom angrily states "Its pronounced CHER."
Nurse replies "And its spelled C-H-A-I-R...maybe you could name the next one ottoman."

Just had to throw that in there...continue...

Grasshopper Green

I hate the cutesy spelling crap. My sister in law butchered all the spellings in her kid's names. I honestly don't know how they're all spelled so I spell them like they sound (for example, one niece is named Dayhnna, but I put "Dana" on her Christmas gift because I'm really not sure if the y or h comes first or if there are any additional letters hiding somewhere).

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Baraka_Guru

I'm not sure what goes through people's heads when then look for obscure names or go with silly spellings. I tend to think it's because they want to instill a kind of uniqueness to their children. If not unique, then at least a special status through naming. It would seem the thought would go something like, "My child is special to me, and so I want them to have a special name—I want them to be different" or something. You know, as a way to stand out from the masses, as though sharing a given name with others is something to avoid.

It's as though they don't realize that there were people named Mohamed, Sara, Jack, William, Maria, Alexander, Emma, and Anna who were indeed important and made significant contributions to the world.

For the record, my given name is one of the more prominent ones in the Bible, while my middle name is a well-known Scottish name (both as given name and surname).

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jewels

I'm lost on that one. Why bad? Are they popular now?

I chose names from characters or writers of the literature I enjoyed based on a personality I came to know as each one grew in my womb.

I considered potential nicknames others would have for them. I thought about the flow with our surname. Imagery and all that -- not so much, as we all have visuals that go with names based on our own experiences. Just be sure they are yours, not someone else's.

Case in point: I recall thinking about the name "Rachel" for one of my daughters. A schoolteacher friend told me that all the Rachels she knew were brats. At that point in time, she scared me out of it, so I used the Rachel as a middle name.

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telekinetic

They are #1 and #2 for girls and boys, respectively, in the US.

I've often heard the "I can't name my daughter X, I knew an X once and she was a bitch!" argument, and to that I call bullshit: Once you have your child, that name will become so intrinsically linked to them that any past mildly negative meaning it may once have had will become completely obliterated. Unless the person you didn't like was an ex, I'd say an unpleasant person from your past having the name you want for your kids shouldn't disqualify it.

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jewels

Absolutely. One of my daughters is named for my grandmother. When I was a child, I hated the name. Thought it was representative of old-smelling people and never would have considered it. As I grew and by the time I gave birth, I realized it was a beautiful name.

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We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
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ZombieSquirrel

My mother was a funny lady. She would joke that we were given our names because if we were stupid, we could at least spell them. We all three have very easy to spell names and only 3-4 characters. My mother had the least amount of faith in me. My brothers both have longer names, but go by the shortened nickname version of the name. My real name on the birth certificate is only the shortened version of a full name.

I want to use family names that are not as common any more. My father's name is now though because of that stupid Twilight crap. My grandmother's name is very unique and I kind of love it. Eldena. If I have a female offspring she'll probably get made fun of and go by a nickname instead. There is also an Aunt Dorkus in my lineage. That would ruin my child.

My friend is a teacher and she had such a difficult time naming her daughter. They didn't know the sex until birth so they worked on both male and female names for 9 months. Every name that her husband came up with, A. would think of a bratty kid she had. She did NOT want to name her child after such bad memories. They finally came up with names that didn't make A. cringe.

I have another teacher friend who had a kid named Gezzikuh. It was pronounced like Jessica. I can't wait to squeeze out a kid and give it a horrible name.

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snowy

I want to name my future daughter after my grandmother, and so to keep the name true, I will keep the harder spelling. It's the Dutch spelling, and so it has a double a in the middle of the name, whereas the English spelling would only have 1.

But otherwise, my names meet all the rules. The English spelling of my grandmother's name is more popular than the Dutch spelling, but it still isn't in the Top 100. My future son's name--named after my husband's grandfather--isn't in the Top 1000.

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Lindy

Well, at least the names have a theme. I watched a college football game this fall, (don't remember the school) and the quarterback was named TyRod. I wondered at the time if he had a brother named BallJoint or LugNut. A sister Tailpipe?

Lindy

noodle

My friend taught a kid named Tekila.
She had fetal alcohol syndrome. Surprise.

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uncle phil

ya never know - she could live to be 90...

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ZombieSquirrel

That's just wrong. That kid does not need to be living with her biological parents.

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robot_parade

I guess Jesus is right out, huh? ;-)

What about Isaac? That's our youngest boy's name, and it fits him well.

I really like Elijah too, but the wife wouldn't go for it.

zenda

An earlier poster expressed concern about the sayability of a forename ending in S sliding into a lastname beginning with S.

I propose a rule based based on an extension of that concern: How does the proposed forename fit with the lastname?

There are a lot of examples here:

ethanwiner.com/funnames.html

[add the www dot stuff... I'm two posts to go before I am allowed to post links]

Most have been manufactured for humour, but I have met a few people who've actually had to carry the burden.

Applying the rule would involve testing the sound and the sight of the names in both their full, shortened and abbreviated forms.

Cimarron29414

When I become President, I will write an executive order allowing 12 to 13-year-olds to petition the court to have their name changed without parental consent. If their given name is deemed by the court to be particularly egregious, I will allow the child to rename their parents to whatever they want. This should solve most of our naming problems. Of course, some moms are going to get renamed "cunt-muncher" or "two dollar whore" and some dads are going to get renamed "micro-dick" by their hormonal pre-teens who endured a decade of teasing - but, justice will be served.

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Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

kriswest

Ahh, heck as long as the kid is loved,nurtured and brought up with decent self respect and responsibility, the name does not matter. Name the kid what ever you want because fro the rest of your life until that kid moves away or even after. You will have one headache after another with them. May as well do something you really want with the kid.

Cimarron29414

Tell that to "Shitonya".

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Gives a man a halo, does mead.

"Here lies The_Jazz: Killed by an ambitious, sparkly, pink butterfly."

kriswest

That name will give that person a unique perspective will it not?

Redlemon

I agree with everything on your list; I think I may have written something quite similar about 7 years ago.
Wrong. I am a Michael, which means I am frequently a "Micheal". It has been in the top boys names for approximately forever, and yet so many people misspell it.

I had a Rule 4; unique initials. My side of the family often uses initials for identification, so I wanted his first initial to not match any immediate family members.

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kriswest

Has anybody else on this thread looked at the names chosen to be online names?????

zenda

Hi Kris.

Hmm ... interesting variant on the topic. Would be 'Rules for online naming -- a gift I can give myself'

If I choose an online name, it is hopefully the product of my well thought-out intent, I am probably in a position to take responsibility for its consequences and to give, if asked, an explanation which I am willing to 'stand by'. It can be as idiosynchratic or as common as I want. It can be transparent to all or to a targetted subsection. "N1ceguy" would be universal, though the touch of 1337speak would gently hint at a subculture-profile. "Sh4rpsword" would not be targetting orchid growers as much as it would target swashbuckle or game addicts. "Sk44rjm4$t3r" would slice the cake even thinner by being identifiable only by those who are familiar with Unreal Tournament, and by bonding with those for whom the merciless substitution of symbols for letters disinguishes the 1337 from the 14m3rz. Embedded peer-group-selection through incomprehensibility to outsiders.

OK if though choice, but the child, however, has no choice, and because, since his or her given name is the first 'handle of contact' with the 'outside world' ... let the name carry the lightest burden of explanation.

ellie

Imo, name your kids whatever you want and spell it however you want. My entire life, I've been asked how to spell my irl name. Was never annoyed by it and never got upset when it was spelled incorrectly. Tomato, tomahto.

kriswest

Sure Zenda I agree to a point. Your name here defines what you want. What if the name a parent chooses for the kid defines similar wants for their kid. Sure they can be really bizzare but look at the world today. It is no longer segregated and simple. Cultures collide, meld and disrupt. The world's names are going to reflect the time. what a person wants for their child is often reflected in that name, its up to the child to figure it out what its parents were thinking. this can be and generally is very productive for the child. Our son was tagged with long complicated names Old style names. Learning to spell his name and learning what they meant helped him define himself.

bagatelle

Is any of his names Rumpelstiltskin?

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kriswest

Not quite, but,, you know thats not too bad of a name,, alot of history in that.