My father once told me that unusual names were fine for girls, but normal names were better for boys. I thought that was ridiculous, even though I like my name. Of his seven kids, I probably have the most unusual of the four girl’s names (I was named after a friend of my mother). The three boys all have common names. I thought my youngest half-brother’s name was unusual when he was born, but it turned out to be common in his age group (in fact, a friend of mine also had a much-younger half brother born around then who got the same name).
According to the Social Security Administration’s Baby Name site, my name made it too the top 1000 for girls briefly in the 1990s, but is otherwise off the charts. It hit the top 100 for boys in the late 1980s, but is barely hanging in there at this point. If you put my real first and last names into the “How Many of Me” site, it will tell you that nobody in the United States has my name. (It seemed to say that about a lot of bloggers when people were checking it out. Maybe they were all named after friends of my mother.) One of the things I don’t like about the state in which I currently live is that both my first name and my last name are more common here than anyplace else I have ever lived. It is unnerving to me.
My brother’s name (the one I’m closest to, the one with the same mother) has been in the top 20, mostly the top 5, since 1880, which is as far back as the Social Security site goes. I could use his real name on my blog, and it would look like a pseudonym.
One of my husband’s reasons for wanting to know the sex of the fetus was to simplify choosing a name, or at least to reduce the negotiations by half.
Finding out that it’s a boy probably did simplify things, because on my own lists of possible names, I was much more attached to the women’s names than the men’s ones. My feminine choices were things like my grandmother’s name, a dear family friend’s name, a good friend’s unusual and very cool name, and the name of an Irish graduate student I knew. All good names, none of them currently very common in the United States. Hey, in graduate school, I was ready to name my first-born after my psychiatrist and/or therapist, so this kid is lucky I waited to breed.
It turns out that one of my top boy’s names is a favorite for my husband as well, so we’ll probably go with that. Maybe. Currently, we’re mostly trying to decide on a middle name.
My main reservation about our current preferred first name for the kid is that it might be too normal, because that would seem like agreeing with my father about something he mentioned casually decades ago, and we can’t have that.
As will be clear from the post, for baby names, I tend to think of relatives or friends I like, or relatives or friends whose names I like. Apparently, if you name a boy after somebody I know, you get a much more common name than if you name a girl after somebody I know.
Like my brother’s name, the name we are thinking of has historically been popular, and is still in the top 100. I’m only reassured because it is moving down the rankings rather than up.
I put it on my list because it is the name of a couple of my husband’s friends and its most common nickname is in fact the name by which his group of graduate school friends were know. (Imagine if there were some infertility bloggers named Julie, Julia, Grrl, Karen, Danae, Jo, and Tertia, and everyone called them “the Julies.” It’s sort of like that. Who said computer science graduate students were logical?)
I didn’t put many family names on my list of boy’s names, because too many men in my family have the same name and enough is enough. It doesn’t help that my husband’s name is a variation of that common name from my side. I like my husband’s middle name, which is a variation of his grandfather’s name, but I don’t fancy it for our kid. Much as I like him personally, I don’t want to saddle a kid with my father-in-law’s name. (According to the Baby Name Voyager’s graphs, my father-in-law may have been the last boy in the United States ever given his name.) I have a vague understanding of a Jewish custom of taking the first initial of a relative’s name for a kid’s name, but haven’t come up with a good name that would fit, and it’s not like my husband’s family follows many non-culinary ashkenazi traditions. I vetoed his other grandfather’s name because I didn’t like it. He vetoed a nice Irish name from my list because some old adversary of his had that name.
I have been trying to think of good X names for a middle name, to offset the perhaps-too-common first name. Xavier would be good, except that it would sound like either we were Catholics or X-men fanatics. Xerxes? (Didn’t he kill a lot of people?) Xander? (I’d have to watch some Buffy to see if I even like that character.) X’s got me into Z’s: Zebediah, Zebulon? (Too reminiscent of Robert Heinlein’s Number of the Beast-ish). Zaphod? (No, but I may use that one for the kid’s bog name.)
Anyway, the current naming status is that we do have a first choice that has only been shared with our parents so far, but who knows? We may end up with a little Zebediah Xerxes after all.
