Sunday, April 1, 2012

Names

I heard a story recently about names.  Part of me hopes it isn't true.  It went like this: a couple has three children.  The oldest is called Coco, the middle child Princess.  When the third child is born they register him with the name Dikenwe.  The registrar is a little surprised, so asks the parents how they decided on it:

"We named all our children after perfumes we like, Coco by Chanel, Princess by Vera Wang and now Dikenwe, you know, because we couldn't call him DKNY"

Oh dear.  What a terrible abuse of power.  Thankfully, he'll only have to live with it until he's sixteen, when he can change it via Deed Poll.  Or maybe he'll love it, it's certainly different.

But even without the benefit of having a parent who is clearly mental, many people end up with names they're not keen on.  We're keen to avoid that, which is why we've been having the name conversation now for nearly twenty weeks.  Because we want to like the name we give our baby.  We also want our baby to like his name, once he's old enough to have an opinion on it.
Meet my son, his name is Sexy.

It's difficult though, isn't it?  Without realising it, I've been going through my life marking names up with little tags: John is too common.  Luke, Leo and Liam would all be alliterative with the surname.  Isaac is already taken by a close member of family.  I was bullied at school by someone called Jason, and someone else called Antony.  Colin sounds too old.  Matthew is too biblical.

Mrs L has a separate list of names which she wouldn't want to bestow on the boy, some of which I quite liked.

We want something a bit different.  But not too different.  Something with no negative connotations from people we've known, or people from history (not too many Adolfs around these days, wonder why?)

The conversation isn't over.  Won't be over until the day we register the baby.  But we do have a short list now.  Eventually we realised there aren't going to be many names we can say, without any reservation, that we're 100% happy with, so we went for the closest we could get.  There are five names on the list, I'm not going to write them here, but I will write our concerns:

Options one, two and three: they're nice, safe, popular names.  But that's the problem, they're a bit dull.
Option four: is shared with a current politician, whose policies we don't like.  We'd like to avoid the inevitable "is he named after...?" questions.
Option five: is of French origin.  Neither of us is remotely French.  We're a bit worried that it might be a touch silly.

When the little guy does make an appearance though, I'm sure all our concerns will melt away.  We're not going to love the boy because of his name, but because of what he is.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and a son by whatever name will be amazing.

13 comments:

  1. We had three names before our little dude was born but he only suited one, so I am sure you will know what to call him when he is born. We always get asked if he is Dylan after Bob Dylan, (NO), so whatever you call him people will always ask that question! Good luck picking

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    1. Thanks, I'm sure it'll become apparent what to go for once we meet him (probably something not even on the shortlist, natch).

      Dylan's a nice name, not sure we'd even considered it...

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    2. Looking forward to seeing what you choose!

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    3. It IS TRUE! I told you it. Mahahaha.

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  2. Oh it's so bloomin' hard isn't it?! We had our boy and girl names picked by the time I was four months pregnant. (We didn't find out the sex of our baby so it was still a surprise, as we were convinced we'd be having a "George" but then "Freya" turned up!) Whatever you go with, the name will stick and the thought you could have gone with anything else won't be remotely possible. My husband's a teacher which meant the whole name thing was even harder - every name I liked he said reminded him of a naughty kid at school!

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  3. Thanks to SAHDandproud for retweeting your link, I did have a minute and this is a very tricky subject indeed. What you do to your child now will affect them for the rest of their life.

    Here on Shetland, they have an interesting approach. You get a lot of "ina"'s, especially in the older generations. You were named after your uncles/aunts/godparents (if I'm getting this right). Didn't matter if you were a boy or a girl. William is alright, but there's Williaminas. Johninas. Frankinas. I kid you not. Nowadays it's much more sensible. I know a Bo, several Bobbys (not Roberts that have been abbreviated, but actual, genuine Bobbys). My wife works in the local maternity department, we're never short of an interesting name.

    But, and here's the clever thing, none of the given names matter. Chances are when you meet someone they'll give you a name they've just been called all their life. So, if someone, on paper, is Arthur William Johnson, there's an outside chance you'll be introduced to Billy (OK, I see where that one comes from) but it's more likely to be Ertie, Fred or something local (and completely out of left-field).

    Whatever you do, your kid will hate their name at some point. I'm a John (my parents thought that up all by themselves). Then they liked it so much they called one of my brothers Ian. Same name, basically. Oh, yes, I know of a John Ian up here.

    We went down the Biblical first name, pick a king for the second. Pretty safe, unusual (or so we thought) to have a Zachariah. Until one of our neighbors named their kid that, born within days of ours and he'll have 2 more in his class at nursery. Go figure.

    Oh, and a friend's kid, Sam? He's named after Samwise Gamgee, but don't tell him. Sorry, turned into a bit of a magnum opus!

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    1. Thanks for your comment/essay John! :-)

      Don't think we'll take the Shetland route, Lewisina? Not sure that works!

      Named for a hobbit, how sad, even if it is the most heroic of them...

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  4. What's wrong with using Daddies name? Muhahahahaha

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    1. Now, actually, nothing. Except it falls into the alliteration trap. Also, not entirely sure I could cope with how twee Lewis Junior sounds!

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  5. We had 5 names on our girls shortlist and I gave my husband the final choice, but it took him 2 days to decide, so I spent 2 days in hospital calling her "thing" and "watsit".

    He also vetoed my favourite names "Maggie" (because of Thatcher) "Tess" (because of Tessa Jowell) and "Clover" because he said it was the name of a cow (any woman reading this will know its Katie's sister in "What Katie did")

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    1. Funnily enough, we had quite a few options for a girl, for some reason they just seemed to come to mind easier. It was back to the drawing board after the scan though.

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  6. We had decided on Thomas which is my husband's middle name and his Father's name, who died when my husband was a child. Then my Aunt went and had a son and called him that, I'm rather close to them so that was ruled out! Then there were a lot of names that had various connotations or links or sounded odd or could be shortened (am not a fan of shortening most names, including Thomas). There ended up being just two names we both liked, both traditional and the one we decided on when (this is still before I got pregnant!) is alliteration with our surname but hey.

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    1. Nothing wrong with alliteration per se, just that as my name already does it I didn't want to have a whole family of them! :-)

      Glad you finally managed to comment! (it is @Mummyglitzer, isn't it?)

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