Baby name choices-what to say or not to say

Looking at my family tree, way back Asenath managed to find Asahel to marry. Both were living in the colony of Connecticut. More recently, I always thought my mom’s name (Cleo) was odd but now as an adult, I really like it and I see it once in a while.

Don’t know anyone personally with the name Dorcas but there is a successful local business woman with that name.

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I have known several adult women named Dorcas. They would be in their 50s/60s about now. Haven’t met any children with that name.

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My daughter (27, adopted from China, middle name her orphanage first-last name combined) went to preschool, pre-k, and elementary school in Chinatown (Manhattan). Almost all the kids in her class used “American” names but have Chinese family names at home.

One thing I found interesting: many of the boys’ “American” names ended in Y: Eddy, Ricky, et al.

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My S has a friend whose parents did that. They have 3 daughters and all have names that are common for both males and females. And they did it for that reason.

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I have a friend (female) named something like Reese – a name that is a last name or a traditional male first name. I live in the South and so it was never weird to me to have a female friend named that (as I imagine it wasn’t uncommon in Nashville when Reese Witherspoon was growing up), but my friend moved up north and then to Canada and everyone assumed she was a male. She had to have legal documents redone because it referred to her as male. Finally she selected a similar feminine sounding name like Rosie and now puts both on her documentation for like a doctor’s appointment or whatever, “Rosie Reese Smith” or “Reese Rosie Smith”. I had never thought of it being a problem with documentation or expectation, but she likes her new name she picked out. I can’t remember if she had middle name or not. I asked her recently too, but the ol’ brain aint what it used to be.

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I was named after one of my parents and given a hyphenated first name, as a kind of reverse of my parent’s first and middle names. I also had a hyphenated last name. Thankfully, my parents did not give me a middle name, but it was always a pain to have to spell both names and figure out how I had been entered into a system, as computer systems often didn’t have an option for a hyphen, so was it under the first part of the name, the second part of the name, all run together, with a space in between, etc.

Thus, when I got married, I took my spouse’s last name as my own. One word with no spaces, hyphens, etc. I will say, though, that in college there was another person who had a love of Jane Austen who had a hyphenated last name. My friends joked that we should marry and then hyphenate our names. So it would have been First-Name MyFamily-Name-NewFamily-Name. The ridiculousness of having three hyphens in one last name would have been bordering on the sublime.

My favorite name combo I heard as an outsider never actually happened. But there was a family whose last name sounded like Coffee. If they’d had another son, they were going to name him Maxwell. :slight_smile:

Our kid is named after my spouse and it’s a very normal, common name. So normal and common that we don’t know anyone in that generation who has it, but one that everyone can spell and pronounce.

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I have a friend who changed her first name as a young adult to a common, traditionally male first name. She doesn’t identify as male or non binary, in fact she presents herself as very traditionally feminine in most ways, but she liked the name and felt it suited her.

In the CA bay area, this didn’t cause any problems at all. However, after she moved to a rural area of CA, people would scrunch up their faces every time she introduced herself, and ask, “Uh… how do you spell that?” When she would give them the spelling, she said that many people seemed clearly uncomfortable with the dissonance of referring to her with that name.

She eventually decided to change the spelling of her name to a foreign language version of the same male name. Even though the pronunciation is the same, apparently the foreign spelling solved the problem and made people much more comfortable with it.

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I’ve learned to smile and say something nice, or at least quite neutral, about other people’s name choices. When D told us their name choices, I did suggest that she look into the saints’ names before finalizing the decisions. The deacons who performed the girls’ baptisms had never heard of either saint and D had to give brief bios on them even after I chimed in and told the deacons they are indeed recognized saints (they’d looked to me to confirm it, maybe thinking I’m ancient enough to know.) My only concern is that the spelling D chose for the names are not the most common.

Yes, some people who design computer systems are not aware of various naming conventions, as one computer science professor describes here:

https://webpages.charlotte.edu/~mperez19/twolastnames.html

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My parents picked my first name just because they liked it. My original middle name was in memory of a great uncle. I never much liked it so when son was born and I took husband’s name, I changed my middle name to my original last name. Because much of my identity was built into that name! I went from usually having to spell my last name to saying “with an e at the end.”

I did play around with how I could re-spell my first name; my favorite was Merry Lynne. I thought I had the most common spelling but it’s amazing to me how often it’s misspelled. I often see Marylyn. And - not infrequently - Maryland. I think that must be autocorrect.

I had a childhood friend whose name was Marylyn–spelled that way.

My husband’s best friend and his brother are both named Mark. We call his friend “Mark” and his brother “Brother Mark.” We’re so used to it that we sometimes forget to explain when talking about him, and people end up thinking we know a monk. This always cracks us up because DH’s brother is the furthest thing from monastic or holy!

Our kids love to tell the stories of how we chose their names. They also like considering the other alternatives we had on our lists. Thankfully, they like their names best.

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We just met a lovely couple. “Hi, I am Andrew. This is my husband Andrew.” Nope, neither goes by a nickname. :laughing: Same last name.

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One poor child in our school was given a number as a name. 9. I pity her.

My niece had a student whose name was Abcde.

That’s just cruel.

From The Story Behind the Name "Abcde" - FamilyEducation

“We did a little digging, and according to the Social Security Administration, as of 2017, there were 373 people named Abcde in the United States, all girls.”

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I’ve known quite a few people/kids with what would commonly be considered very strange names, and despite the chuckles and stares, most seem happy with their names. I don’t want to out any families, but some are even multi-generational, where a parent with a unique/bizarre name choose to name their children with an equally unique/bizarre name, sometimes following the same pattern. I take this as further confirmation that they quite liked having an unusual name.

In short, while I understand the entertainment value, I think the pity for these kids might be misplaced. At the very least, the bizarre names might provide the makings for a unique college application about how they dealt with the prudish reactions .

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I privately have no patience with random misspellings or with cutesy names for girls. If it sounds implausible when you put “Chief Justice” in front of it, then don’t name your daughter that.

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