What’s in a name?
Stress.
Sociologists and name researchers say they are seeing unprecedented levels of angst among parents trying to choose names for their children. As family names and old religious standbys continue to lose favor, parents are spending more time and money on the issue and are increasingly turning to strangers for help.
Some parents are checking Social Security data to make sure their choices aren’t too trendy, while others are fussing over every consonant like corporate branding experts. They’re also pulling ideas from books, Web sites and software programs, and in some cases, hiring professional baby-name consultants who use mathematical formulas.
Denise McCombie, 37, a California mother of two who’s expecting a daughter this fall, spent $475 to have a numerologist test her favorite name, Leah Marie, to see if it had positive associations. (It did.) This March, one nervous mom-to-be from Illinois listed her 16 favorite names on a tournament bracket and asked friends, family and people she met at baby showers to fill it out. The winner: Anna Irene.
Holy crap; get a grip people.
Read more, if you can deal with it, at The Wall Street Journal.
It seems like it’s just a matter of time before we start seeing young men named Frodo.
after bill clinton launched his little fusillade against afghanistan hide-outs in 1998, babies all over the middle east were named osama. this was about the same time he bombed the principal pharmaceutical plant in sudan. that’s when i considered naming my son aspirin.
Well, how hard it is to come up with a name when it’s assumed your first born will automatically be _ _ _ , IV ? (Just teasing.)
We named our first born Joshua, even though it was trendy, because, well, he just WAS a Joshua. But, when my husband wanted to give him the middle name, Tree, I put my foot down. (Remember, this was an era when children where often named Ocean, Bear, Sunshine, Star, etc., and there is a whole Joshua Tree forest in the SW.)
Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking, or if they even are thinking, when they come up with thier baby names.
You just say that because we have a sister whose middle name is from a comic strip character, Aleta, wife of Prince Valiant. (Janet Leigh played Princess Aleta in the movie.)