Fun with Baby Names
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 9:10 AM
I asked Camilla what she thought we should name her little brother, and she said, “Sister.”
I explained that we can’t name a boy “Sister” (uh, not that we would name a girl that either) and asked for another suggestion. So she said we should name him Camilla Claire.
We’ll be making this decision without her help, I guess.
The name of the child is a big decision, the biggest one most parents make during a pregnancy. You can always buy another kind of baby carrier if you don’t like the one you’ve picked, and in a relatively short time your child won’t even be using that crib any more… but his name will stick with him for his entire lifetime.
I am a major baby name geek. One of my favorite places on the Internet is the Social Security Administration’s baby name website, which has a huge amount of information about the baby names that are used by Americans. (As long as they’re used by a sufficient number of Americans - “Arwen” has never been in the top 1000 baby names for any given year, so there’s no information about it on the site.)
I also enjoy the Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager, a cool graphical device that shows the rise and fall of popularity of any given name (again, as long as it has been in the top 1000) since the 1880s.
All these numbers are mostly for my own enjoyment, but they also help me make informed decisions about what names I want to use for our children. (That’s setting aside the issue of what names Bryan wants to use for our children, but since he mostly prefers to reject rather than propose names, getting him to agree is a later step in the process.)
My own personal priorities for a baby name are: (1) the first name must not be too popular, although the middle name can be, (2) it should be a saint’s name or a variation on a saint’s name, (3) it has to be classic-y sounding, and, of course (4) it has to sound good with our last name, which is pronounced MOE-zhur. Admittedly, requirements #1 and #3 are not very specific. Generally #1 means that I would really have to be in love with a name to use it if it were in the top 300 names or so; generally number #3 means that a name has to have been around for a while, and also is not gender-neutral.
Bryan and I never agreed on a boy name last time around. We would have been in trouble if Camilla hadn’t been a girl! This time, since we’re having a boy, we definitely need a boy name. Since we don’t use or share the name before the baby is born, we’ve still got a few months to make a decision. I am feeling the pressure, though.
It would be nice of you to help distract me! As a name geek I’m very interested in anecdotal information about baby names, and why people use the names they do. What are/were your personal baby-naming priorities? If you’re comfortable sharing, what names did you use for your kids? I’d love to have some information to keep me from obsessing about what in the world are we going to name our own baby?
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