Friday, August 04, 2006

Can't Think of a Name

I finally got access to a library that had The Baby Name Wizard, and so I've been browsing through it with great enjoyment this week. (This is purely a relocation result. No announcement or prospective announcement is hinted at, implied, or otherwise insinuated.)

Naming is an amazing thing. Here you have a defenseless, undefined soul that you will brand with a name that will follow it all of its life. You pick a name because you like it, motivated by all those unseen factors that wind up with you picking the same name that all the other parents of your age and socioeconomic status are, quite independently, picking. (Yep, we're into "Antique Charm," "Timeless," "Ladies and Gentleman," just like the vast majority of our friends, although some go for the more Exotic Traditionals.)

You had a whole list of other options, but you settle on one, cross your fingers, and write it on the birth certificate. And somehow the name and the child grow together until you can't imagine them being anything else.

Naturally this led to our sprucing up our hypothetical naming list. We love selecting names--if only the rest of parenting were so easy! We'd probably have twenty kids, though, and that might be a bit much Duchy for the world to bear.

But we keep coming up against a snag. There are several combinations that I just love, both for boys and girls, that have the initials E. R. I don't think the emergency room connotation is that bad (Ha! We should have named D2 one of those!), but I'm worried that the initials E. R. R. are just too much to impose upon a child, especially a boy who has no hope of changing it. Reversing the names just doesn't have the right sound. Would it be awful to have your initials spell ERR? Would everyone think your parents didn't want you?

5 comments:

the Joneses said...

If you ask me, ERR is safer than naming your child "Chance," which has all kinds of implications of accidents. Besides, how many people are going to know what "err" means, anyway?

I'm stuck on AD- names, all of which are invalidated now because we've actually used one, and I'm not condemning myself to two sound-alike names among my children.

As long as you protect your child from the more embarrassing three-word initials, you're probably all right. (I read a book once where the main character's name was Beverly Ursula Teresa Trapp... obviously concocted for the sake of the story, but a shadow on her life nonetheless.)

-- SJ

Anonymous said...

Well, yeah, I wouldn't do that. Honestly, few enough people know your middle name, but YOU know it. An easy way out is to give the kid two middle names even if you can't fit both on the birth certificate. This gives the added plus of using more cool names!

We like the baby name game too! After our niece was (we felt) unfortunately named under the influence of heavy pregnancy hormones, we decided to come up with a list before we conceived. We came up with names for the first 9 kids(!).

5 kids later, we are sticking with the plan! My kids actually love the idea of "knowing" who the next kid will be (Luke or Catherine).

Rachelle said...

Naming a girl has become the bane of my existence. I had a future daugther named for years and then.... Well, I got married and by right, the father has a part to play in this. He doesn't like the name or anything else I can come up with. So we are stuck. -rlr

Devona said...

My mom's initials were BAD. It made for nothing more than fun in our home.

Queen of Carrots said...

Rachelle~the Baby Name Wizard suggests Juliana, Lesley, Piper, Sophia, and Avery as sister names for Bennett. Quite an interesting mix of ideas.

Devona~My grandmother's married initials were LBS. For some time she was secretary to a man whose initials were FEW. So every piece of correspondence that went out carried the line at the bottom: FEW/lbs.