OT: MGoParents, why did you give your kids an unusual name?
In the thread about Daxx Garman below, someone wondered why a parent would burden their son with the name "Daxx."
It got me thinking back to the naming rules my wife and I followed when our kids were born 13.5 and 11 years ago...
1. Must be the most common spelling of the name. In other words, Kelly is "Kelly," not "Kelleigh."
2. Must be able to discern the sex of the child from the name. Eliminated Jordan, Taylor, Dylan, Avery, etc.
3. Must be an actual name. So Keyden and all of these other newer names were eliminated. As was Marvcus and Plaxico.
4. Must look professional on a resume or a nameplate.
Not going to give the specific names that we ended up with, as it would make me too identifiable to anyone on here knows me, but our daughter's name has been in the top 20 for at least a few decades...and our son's name is less common and slightly Jewishly-ethnic, but still would be recognizable to everyone. There might even be a character on "Entourage" who has the same name.
So, my question to you, MGoParents, is why did you select an odd name or unusual spelling for your children? Did you have any naming rules? Years later, do you regret giving your child a less-common name?
I've wanted to ask people these questions in person, but obviously you would risk offending them...so I thought the anonymous nature of this forum would cause more people to provide explanations.
I do realize that the nature of this post creates a large opening for snark and smart-assery. Hoping it'll be kept to a minimum.
EDIT (five hours or so after OP): Just had my first opportunity to read thru some of the comments here. While the vast majority of you are participating in the discussion as I intended, it appears as though a few of you (MaizeJacket, BornSinner, DanWillhor) were offended by the post and/or thought it was elitist and/or racist. While I think you may be reading more in to the post than is there, I'd like to nonetheless sincerely apologize for upsetting anyone. It was not my intention to do so.
EDIT (six hours or so after OP): I just found this posting by MICHGOBLUE. He/she more eloquently summarizes the point of my OP.
"At first I saw the same thing, but if you read his message, he isn't singling out names that are traditionally "ethnic," but rather made-up names. For example, Esteban is a typically Hispanic name and Shaquille is a typically African-American name. Based upon the OP's post, I don't think that he would have a problem with either, as the names are traditional (in each of their respective cultures), discernible by gender and spelled in the traditional manner. What I took the OP as having a problem with was simply stringing together a slew of letters and calling it a name or taking an existing name and just mis-spelling it to be unique.
One other point: on the issue of being "professional" sounding, as much as people should be hired based purely upon merit, it is a reality that people end up being discriminated against for just about anything in the hiring process, and a name - being one of the first things that a prospective employer sees - could create a negative first impression. Note that this is not limited to "ethnic" or "racial" sounding names. How well do you think Spike, Bruiser, Mercury or Venus would do interviewing for a major investment bank or law firm? Not everything is about race."
with whatever other Burrills might be around. They might want to fight me for the towns.
Awesome lyrics...
Changing names from the actual ones, but you'll get the idea.
My father and I had the same initals, but different names. My father-in-law's first name starts with the same letter as my middle name, so we were going to name our first son Steven David Harbaugh. However my wife had health issues and we adopted our first son from Russia. He was 10 months old and was named Dmitri. Some adoptive parents change the whole name, but it just seemed to fit him, so we named him Dimitri Simonovich Harbaugh. We are not Russian, my wife is Cajun/Irish and I an mutt. Ovich, for those who don't know is common in Russian, for son of, so he is Dimitri, son of Simon. We lived in DC at the time, so there were all kinds of kids with names from other nationalities.
We were in out early 40s and back here in our exurban house outside of Columbus when our younger son suprised us. We did not think my wife could carry to term and weren't sure what effect the meds would have on him. Other than a little low muscle tone and a built in appetite suppressant (had a feeding tube for the first 40 months) he is fine. We talked about going with Steven David, but I told my wife, after years of yelling Dmitir's name, I wasn't sure I wanted to do that with my Dad's. We thought long and hard about naming hime Sergei Douglas Harbaugh, to keep the initial, and also so he and Dmitir had something in common. My wife talked me out of t it. He wasn't Russian. We were not longer in DC, so the environment was different and it would be more odd. With US Russian relations strained, Dimitri was getting some crap at school. I said he could use his middle name if he wanted, but she was insistent. We settled on Scott David Harbaugh. Still had her Dad's name. Still had my initials.
Funny thing is when Scott was two and a half my wife said she regrets we didn't go with the Russian sounding first name and tried to convivnce me to get his name changed.
My husband thought it would be fun to name our son Rocket, so calling him on his bluff, I said, "Sure, but only if we do it the right way and name him Raghib." We ended up naming him Henry.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
While I do not have kids, I do have two nephews. My sister married a non-Greek with a standard American last name, so to ensure that people would know that her kids were Greek, she gave them traditional Greek first names (one of which is my father's name).
When I have kids, because they will carry the Greek last name, I will probably go with Anglicized versions of Greek names, as my name is. It helps that my mother (who by tradition will name my first daughter) has a common name that is the same in Greek and English.
I'm so happy my family doesn't try to do unique names. I am eternally grateful that my name is classically spelled and traditional for my heritage and the country I live.
I won't criticize others choosing "unique" names, although I do think to myself "what a bunch of fucking idiots to name their kid _________."
My only outward criticism is to people that name their kids nicknames or dumb spellings of conventional names. If you want to call your kid "Liam", fine, whatever it's your choice, but his name should be "William". Want to name him "Jack"? It should be John (or James or Joseph if you want to push it).
Additionally, if you've managed to pick a normal name, can you not manage to spell it correctly? Amy should be Amy, not Aimee; Katie should be Kathryn/Kathleen and not Kati or Caty whatever else terrible variation people come up with. James should not be Jaymes; Ryan should not be Rian or Rhian or something dumber than that.
People defying these conventions make me want to punch them in the face.
I didn't name my kid. We split when she was pregnant. (Yeah, I'm a dick.)
She informed me that I had better hope for a girl, because if she had a boy she was going to walk out of the hospital and I would never see her again. That it would all be up to me. There was a voice in my head that said "You are not that lucky."
Since she had a girl, I had no say in anything.
She named her a fairly common name with a slightly uncommon spelling. No big deal. That is until she went to school and a teacher would constantly misspell her name. Mom went into a screaming rant over how that bitch can't even get her name right. She didn't appreciate it when I told her to calm down, that the teacher has how many students, 3 of whom in the class have the same name as our kid, but spelled the common way. If you want your kid to have an uncommon name, be ready for people to make mistakes. It's life.
The wife and I have a lot of Irish blood in our families. We also have some really interesting "family names", too, like Ambrose, Rose, Effie, etc. My middle name is a short version of my grandfather's first name (he had no middle name), so we decided to use that family name for my son's middle name, but went with the full length version. This led us to an Irish name that would work for a variety of future career outcomes. If he was a Texas oilman, his initials would work great, kind of like "J.R.". If he became an author, his first initial with middle name would sound very literary. His first name turned out to be very common for his age group when he went through school.
For my daughter, my wife had a name that she loved and so there was little discussion of alternatives. We used her grandmother's maiden name as her middle name. It's an Irish spelling of the name. So, we are at the hospital, the wife's in labor and she suddenly decides to change the first name. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me. No, she decided to go with the other name. Turns out, that became a popular name, too. A certain presidential candidate helped make that name popular during the 90s.
My legal first name is 11 characters. It does not fit on computerized forms, like standardized tests. So, we did have an 8 characters or less rule in effect for both names.
I went to elementary school with twins whose last name was LEAR ...
Chanda & Crystal
Yes, "Chanda Lear"
smh
True story, went to elementary school with a girl named Sue Keeney. So you know how most of the kids pronounced it....
What the hell were the parents smoking the night they named her. Even if Sue/Susan is a family name, put it as a middle name.
You don't have to name that kid soon as it pops out. Take a few hours. Take a couple days. You don't have to have a name when you go home. Wait a couple days and see if a name fits your baby.
Also, you should not be shooting for boring. The world doesn't need another 290988833892 ""bobs".
That said, more "jims" less "Urbans".
If you're both comfortable with this and that is the plan, then this can be a great way to go about it.
But if you're "arguing" about names, it only increases the tension when every time a doctor/nurse/relative walks in/calls/etc. you have to answer the "what did you name him?" question without saying "Nothin yet, just shut up!!!" which is what you will be thinking in your head when you're all pissed off about it.
Hopefully any new parents are more on the same page with eachother than my wife and i were at the time. Naming your child should be a fun experience. Do everything you can to make it that way and enjoy it.
If your wife is as stubborn as mine and you are not on the same page, best of luck.
Exactly.
In the case of my son, we had chosen a rather traditional name with family history - Charles.
Then our son was born and both of us were like, "nope he is not a Charles" and gave him a different name. One of my nephews was born one name and about five days later re-named (thankfully and with no real pressure to do so, but the first name was not a good one).
Completely agree on those who name their child a common name but with a phoenetically spelled version. Not necessarily for the resumes down the road, but for the 1st grade teacher would will think the kid can't spell his/her own name.
And seriously, can we stop it with the ...
Aiden / Braden / Caden / Hayden / Jayden derivatives, please???
Well in reading some of the comments i was surprised at the amount of racial stuff. I'm just going to stay away from all that. For the record i didn't take the OP that way. But i was mainly focused from my perspective while reading the main topic of the post, which is why people name their kids certain things. This strikes a chord with me because my wife and i had a lot of interesting arguments in the naming process.
My wife has a very unique name. I've never known anyone else with it. She complains often that people can't spell it, or assume it is actually a two-letter acronym (i have a feeling i'm using the wrong word there) instead of a spelled out name.
So you can imagine my surprise when she wanted to name our kids all these "crazy" unique names?!?!? I'm like, wtf, you want our kids to "suffer" like you have?
I did read Freakonomics and many other baby naming texts. The general "advice" i took away was, you can get a certain level of "unique" before you may "hurt" child's future success chances in some way. I'm not going to go in to all the reasonings but most of them actually made some decent sense.
My wife wanted to name our first child Torin. It's not a bad name or anyting, just so unique i was against it. I wanted Caleb or Aiden. We ended up picking Kaleb. Because clearly it would be a travesty to my wife to use the most common spelling of the name.
Coincidentally, my son was born the same weekend as Bubba Watson's son Kaleb. I had no knowledge of the name picking or spelling of Bubba's son, but thought it was really cool that we had named ours the same. My wife on the other hand took it as a bad sign that "we picked too common of a name." Sigh.
For our 2nd son we named him Hayden. I had liked the name (without including the "Y") and had suggested it. My wife loved it. This made me freak out and think it was a terrible choice and i was regretting it but after remembering the goings back and forth with first son, i was just like "fuck it, i'm not dealing with that anymore" and went with it. (Amazing how less of a "big deal" things are after your first) After he's born and we're making name official i made 1 attempt at removing the "Y" in the name for it making it too "girly". My wife wanted to keep it and i quickly gave up, once again remembering the 1st experience. So not more than a week ago my wife makes a comment that we shouldn't have had the "Y" in the name.... I give up forever. At least we're not having any more kids. Hopefully.
As an aside and relative to the conversation, I have a step daughter named Macey. So a "theme" we used was the long "A" sound in the first syllable of our children's names. Which my wife's name also has. My name doesn't have that, but it has 2 "A's" in it. Some people do illiteration themes. I thought our long "A" theme was kinda cool.
So that's my way too long to share on a michigan blog story about the naming of my children.
Clearly i just don't want to work today.
With our first, a son, my husband and I agreed on two names, but he preferred one over the other, and I was the opposite. I felt like because he was a boy, my husband should get his first choice. I might not have felt that way if I didn't like the name but I did, and so my first choice became his middle name. It all worked out, and his name really fits him. Not to give your wife a hard time, names are a big deal, that's just how it worked in our house. With our second....actually, now that I think about it, he also got his first choice! I love her name, though, so it's not as if I lost out. And truth be told, it was my father who inadvertently put the kibbosh on my first choice. When I was telling him our two choices, he said of my first choice, Gracie, "Ugh, I hate that name. It reminds me of Gracie Allen, who played dumb." And it sort of took the wind out of that name. My daughter's middle name is Elizabeth, and not Grace.
MGoButthurt is strong in this thread.
funny thing is, people now name their kid something with '-ayden' thinking they are unique. They are unique to names from when the parents were born, but not now. Almost everyone now is naming their kid 'something-ayden' or something that rhymes with it...aiden, cayden, hayden, payton, dayton, and all the 'unique' spellings.
It's really a symptym of extreme narcissism, thinking the kid you produced is a special snowflake, different from all the rest.
Feel bad for the boys who are going to grow up with these feminine sounding names. It's going to affect them. Aiden is cute for a 2 yr old boy, but not a 25/45 yo. Imagine a 55 year old Aiden...yeesh.
It's not an uncommon Irish name, I know a few grown men by that name, usually spelled Aidan. I bet you don't live anywhere near New York or Boston.
Studies show that women get passed over for jobs during resume screens based on their names alone. Gender neutral names for girls can be an advantage if you want them to have careers in tech or other dominated fields.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
Wow! great story! thanks for sharing!!!
it's called misappropriation. Look it up, Mr. Artie.
My wife's grandmother didn't discover until she filed for Social Security that the name she was using her whole life was completely different from the name on her birth certificate. She was the baby of the family and her oldest brother was about 20 when she was born. He was tasked with filling out the paper work for her birth certificate. The name chosen for her was the same as one of his ex-girlfriends. By the time he got to town to fill out the form he apparently forgot which ex-girlfriend she was named after and put down a different name.