For boys, you can use the standard rule (one name from Thomas the Tank Engine and one from one of the Weasley family in Harry Potter). Girls are harder.
I wonder if my mother regrets the name she and my father chose for me. Maybe she wishes she had given me her father's name rather than adapting it to something they thought would be more normal for a Caucasian in the United States.
What's the motherland version of Princess Fluffykins Hussein Obama?
You could have at least google-proofed it.
On the plus, they made a move about me! M-s from America.
I saw the trailer for it and it looks pretty good and fairly accurate, although they had to tone it down a bit to make it more believable.
What's wrong with Amelia, Anne, James, or Thomas?
I asked the name Alphonse thanks to my uncle. Probably the only thing he's ever done for me.
I hated my name when I was a kid because it was weird and stood out and I got lots of random nicknames I didn't like, but, eh, in hindsight, teens can be angsty about anything. I'm glad I simplified it and I kiiinda wish I had simplified it more, but not really, I can deal with spelling the unpronounceable part for people now and then.
My daughter's name is ridiculously long. I fully expect her to drop one part of her hyphenated last name while she's in college if not earlier and will have no hard feelings if it's the part from me.
Intentional naming tradition: she has Cassandane's middle name, I believe Cassandane's middle name came from some family member of hers, I had my father's middle name (until I changed it like I expect her to), and my sister has my mother's middle name.
Unintentional naming tradition: like me, Atossa is named for an antiquarian conqueror with a Greek connection. My sister/her aunt even has a Greek name, although there's no famous ruler by that name. I don't think there's any good reason for this. I don't have Greek ancestry, my parents just liked the sound of them, and Cassandane and I didn't even decide on Atossa's name until she was about a day old and one of the tie-breakers was our doula, whose name is similar to what we named Atossa.
Jammies and I sound like we're straight out of Driving Miss Daisy.
11 which is a weird mistake to make. Not sure how it happened.
Like, it's a semi-frequent thing that if we're meeting someone together, the mutual friend will say, "Picture what you think a Jammies and Heebie would look like. It's not this, right? [gesturing our way] Isn't that hilarious??"
Optimal formula (probably white people only): One common name plus one uncommon name (not an uncommon spelling of a common one). Use common name until child asks to change or until about 12, when ask which they prefer.
9.2: But you could have been Alf! You may have been just the right age for it too.
Both Sally and Newt have sort of dull, oldfashioned names, that I thought of as reasonably uncommon when they were born. Annoyingly, I was doing that leading edge of the trend thing, and both names are super common now. I like them both still, but I sort of wish that hadn't happened.
Also, it somehow failed to occur to me that the first two letters of Sally's name are the same as the first two letters of mine, which leads to confusion when filling out forms. Wouldn't have done that if I'd thought about it.
Picture what you think a Jammies and Heebie would look like. It's not this, right?
I'm pretty sure that I look like my name as much as is possible for names that aren't "Andre the Giant."
Picture what you think a Jammies and Heebie would look like.
A Klingon and a Vulcan. Both intersex.
I know! But surprise, we're dull-looking!
14 Because that name was considered for me or because of the error?
It would have been in honor of my maternal grandfather who died before I was born.
Pretty sure I'm older than Moby but I am younger than peep.
Hate my name a lot, for oddness and associations with certain widespread intellectual properties. Sister hates hers too, for extreme normalcy. My middle name is fine.
A more interesting essay might address names not expressly regretted, but inarguably morally and spiritually culpable: Jayden, Bryce, Hylyrée, Tristan, M/ox/ie Cri/mefi/ght/er (come on, man).
23.1: Simply a joke about how our brains fail as we get older.
A more interesting essay might address names not expressly regretted, but inarguably morally and spiritually culpable: Jayden, Bryce, Hylyrée, Tristan, M/ox/ie Cri/mefi/ght/er (come on, man).
This is just an essay about self-loathing, right?
For reasons specific to this blog, I find it amusing when somebody names their little girl "Emerson."
The one area where I freely indulge my incipient grumpy-old-man-ness is with respect to any name that rhymes with "aden".
My name was also on the leading edge of a trend (gaining, at one point, 136 places on the SSA chart over my lifetime), so on paper I appear much younger than I am.
31. How are you with names that rhymes with South Yemen?
Keep guessing, Moby. One of my most successful moments as a human was when my mom informed me her nephew/my cousin had had a child, 'Turner' and asked me to guess gender. To which I responded "I don't know, but I'm sure it's pretty as a picture."
33 - pretty much fine with anyone whose name rhymes with Sana'a as long as they pronounce the 'ayn correctly.
Though it may surprise you old fogeys, I predate both.
I wonder how many Daenaeryses there are, and how much they will hate their parents.
I think my mother regrets not naming me Zilpha, which is the name she was considering when she was reminded of the cautionary (or encouraging?) example of Okla Homa Bobo d/b/a "Uncle Doc." My child's name is perfect. The step-ish son's name is not but it shortens to something fine, except that something fine is also my dog's name. This doesn't count as not-not commenting because the mandate to invoke Okla Bobo whenever possible supercedes any other intentions.
I wonder how many Daenaeryses there are, and how much they will hate their parents.
Khaleesi more likely. And then a few years later, Khaleighsea.
I'm stumped to think of a name that can be shortened to Fido.
Btw, I need baby names for my extra nephew. Left to his own devices my brother will name him "Thomas."
If I didn't already reach my spit take quota today, I would have done it at 44. Good show.
She's had a few, but then again too few to mention.
I want a middle name so bad but there's no dignified way to just give yourself one.
My grandfather did. He picked "Bernard". Maybe that made it easier.
Maybe that he did this in 1930 or so make it easier.
55: My parents didn't give me a middle name. Then when I was a teenager Mom bought me something monogrammed, and decided it looked dumb with only two initials. Then, for some reason, she thought I should start using it on forms, and because I was a compliant and stupid teenager, I did.
Now, anything from junior year of high school through college, my middle initial shows up as "R", not standing for anything. I'm always vaguely expecting that they'll arrest me for fraud one of these days because of it.
55: I could bequeath one to you. How about Medea?
55 btw is in contrast to my extremely dignified hobby of collecting men's last names.
58.2: Aha! I knew it! Your time is up, LB!
Clytaemnestra Stabby Hitler Stalin Bundy.
Is the medial initial as much a marker of US WASPiness as it is purported to be?
58 is an amazing feat of will on your mother's part. I have both my parents' last names so have always had at least three intials so my WASP-y tote bags look fine.
60: With Elizabeth Taylor dead, someone has to continue the tradition.
64: I'm Catholic and I always use my middle initial when I sign things.
At this point, I don't think I would be physically capable of writing my signature any other way.
Do you sign things in aspirational social-striving fashion?
58 is so awesome. You should keep using the "R" but insist it has no period after it, to annoy your staff. And if anyone asks you what it stands for, it stands for RRRRRRRAHR!
66 Isn't Zsa Zsa Gabor still among the living?
64 It kind of is, which is probably where my longing comes from, but also goes around purporting this? I don't know if I have ever heard or thought "oh dear, those WASPs carrying on with their middle names again," though now that I type that it seems appropriate.
Keep the R but write it backwards.
58. When I was in high school I decided I needed a middle name, because my first and last names are both really short. It's "M." It stands for "middle." I don't use it on anything official.
It didn't occur to me that anybody was not giving middle names to kids during the years when we were born.
Everyone knows the best example of the power of the comma to set off a nonrestrictive relative clause right? "Elizabeth Taylor's second marriage, to Richard Burton..." v. "Elizabeth Taylor's second marriage to Richard Burton..."
She's always Mrs. Larry Fortenski to me.
66: Yes, And in looking this up I discovered there is a disturbing connection between Liz and Zsa Zsa.
58: If your initials were LRB people might start confusing you with the London Review of Books.
My uncle, who appeared on US immigration documents as Norman NMI (No Middle Initial) Young was firmly known as Bob from a young age. I suppose he could have said it was an adopted middle name.
Don't/didn't? Catholics adopt an extra name at First Communion?
That would definitely be striving. Like naming your kid 'Prince' or 'Money'.
79 Wait, did they share a husband?
81 Yes, and they still do, but who really uses it these days?
82 to 80. My dad frequently calls me Bob, though the name is possessed by neither me nor anyone else in the entire extended family.
83: Zsa Zsa Gabor's stepson Conrad Hilton Jr. was Ms. Taylor's first husband. The disturbing part is that Zsa Zsa had an affair with her stepson (before he married Liz).
I like the idea of getting/choosing new, grownup names at some point. Like Ged climbing shivering from the spring.
85: We like to say, "Go to bed, Fred!" to my stepdaughter because it never fails to enrage her. "My name is not Fred!!!!!"
Speaking of Liz's marriages, should I watch the Burton/Taylor Doctor Faustus? Barry?
81.2: I never heard of that. You get a confirmation name at confirmation (age 13 or so), but you never use that.
My ex-wife changed her name when she went to college. We would tease her that she should have changed it to "Puddle Bowie".
Did the lawyer write that down specifically or just "mental cruelty"?
Which would have made 'Puddle' doubly appropriate.
You get a confirmation name at confirmation (age 13 or so), but you never use that.
Probably what I was thinking of, I'm no scholar of Catholic practices. I know one person who used her confirmation name as her Bolshevik illegal name or whatever they call it when she became a nun- i.e. Sister ConfirmationName.
Just confirmed with my mother (who has a middle name) that she didn't give me a middle name and made my first name a nickname (think, idk, Angie instead of Angela) because she considers extra name-sounds to be "anxious Yankee airs." Ok, Savonarola.
86 I think I knew that once, but I had those neurons removed. Thanks.
89 Been too long since I've seen it but I don't remember good things about it though I've always loved watching him act. Skippable I'd say.
There are also names that gather unfortunate connotations after birth, like the many Jewish Adolfs born beore 1930. In middle age, my uncle transitioned from "guy with weird Yiddish name" to "guy named after Japanese car company."
To 64, the first initial then middle name is much more WASP. J. Charles Whitley-Smith, for example.
I still hate my full first name. My parents (well, at least as long as Mom could have opinions) still really like it. I do get compliments from older African American ladies. Usually, I'm surly about name compliments, but they just sound so tickled about it. I fill out my nickname as an aka on government paperwork, so I think LB is safe.
My middle name is short and simple (and my mother's name), because my parents assumed when I married (oops), I would drop the old middle and my maiden name would become my married middle name.
The boyfriend has an excellent set of names. His mother tells how his name was her first choice. Nicholas was taken by a cousin born a few months before, and he "just didn't look like a Louis" at birth. I have no idea what baby might look like a Louis (or any name, really), but I think he lucked out. His father had two sort of unusual names (for great uncles) and wanted to be sure the kids didn't get screwed.
First s/b third in the last paragraph, dunno how I mangled that story.
I'm still a little sad that all my ideas for virtue names got overridden.
One of my nephews has a first name we don't like. It is looking more and more like he's (going to be?) a girl and my main thought is 'oh good, a second chance at a first name'.
I also don't have a middle name! Let's start a club! In middle and high school, I used to joke that my middle name was Asterisk, but people generally believed me and so I didn't get any laughs, and so I stopped making the joke.
That's also the middle name of Florida Man.
I knew lots of Florida men, then.
People joke about Daenerys upthread, but my 4 YO niece's middle name is Arya.
Her brother's first name is C/hivalry. (He seems content with it. We'll see what happens when the angsty teenage years roll along.)
I had some Indian friends in Austin who named their kid Aryan.
When I changed my name to my ex's it was well after we got married (a year later, maybe?) and he had to submit an affadavit that I wasn't just some stalker trying to unilaterally affiliate myself with him. What I'm realizing now is that indicates taking someone else's name without asking is at least worth a TRY.
The naming system we backed into for Zardoz 2: The Squeakquel has meant that we don't really have to think about it and thus don't have much room to regret our choice. It is not a name it would have occurred to me to choose, but I have come quite strongly around to it. Hopefully it's not catching-a-coming-wave-y, although I suspect it could be.
Attila is a totally legit Hungarian name.
And then you can have "Scourge of God" as your middle name.
112 and 113 aren't mutually dependent. There's no reason at all you can't have "Sophie Scourge of God" or whatever.
If my kid were a boy she was going to be Guy Alaric Stabby. I don't want any more kids and don't think I could get a non-French partner on board anyway, but god that is so good.
My dad wanted to name me Zephaniah. I'm sure somebody would have regretted that.
Scrubby the Tugboat, Scourge of God.
R stands for scouRge of god
It's amazing to me that Khaleesi is more popular than Daenerys, given that Daenerys is an actual name and Dany is a perfectly decent non-embarassing nickname.
One of my friends just had an Arya, which seems to me the clear choice if you're going for GoT names, and is common enough that it's not even necessarily GoT related. That said, no one should be giving anyone GoT names until the story is over. If Daenerys commits genocide, people might wish they didn't name their kids Khaleesi.
107 - and they didn't then name their daughter Sorcery? Big miss there.
My initials have the property that, written in a sufficiently primitive script, they're equivalent up to rotation. Also, they spell out the name of a (marginally non-canonical) Pokémon. Otherwise, entirely boring. Middle name was probably unpopular for a long time--I always thought it was old-fashioned, associated with hillbillies and English kings--but it's now best known for a sexy vampire.
120: I can only hope that millennial naming patterns get subsumed into WASP traditions, so we get people with names like Jonsnow K. Billingsly IV. ("K" for "King-in-The-North", obviously.)
Speaking of Pokemon, I tried and failed to take down a level 5 gym. But somebody has to do something before the whole city turns blue.
A co-worker named their kid Arya (possibly spelled a little differently), very much an intentional GoT reference. Just saw her this morning, visiting the office, in fact.
The middle names with which I would bless my children: Erasmus and Theodora. These used to be my preferred first names, but I've matured greatly since then.
126: Now that's a name due for a comeback. Probably in the form "Aelvyra", but whatever.
115 minus the Stabby bit was amazingly close to the name of a great uncle of mine.
AISIHMHB, Jammies picked out kid names when he was in college, which were Sera, Sneaux, and Jealousy. The worst! Bless his heart.
Jealousy is a good name if you want the cops to chase you around.
131 Jean Sneaux Le Roi du Nord.
Yay, baby squeakquel!
The Calabat's first name is reasonably but not overwhelmingly popular, but subject to the usual local baby name kreaytivv spelling. Pebbles' name gets a lot of polite "that's... interesting..."
Jealousy Marmaduke Scourge of God Sanchez.
I accidentally earwormed myself with the Oak Ridge Boys.
44: My brother is getting married tomorrow and his fiancee's two nieces will be there, as well as my daughters. The older, 6 or 7, has Sally's name and the younger is Khaleesi. It also cracks me up that because the fiancee's brother's partners have both been Asian-American, there are zero white kids among the next generation of these otherwise very white families.
I have a little name regret but I was doing the best I could at the time. Nia maybe should have kept her long, difficult name, and she's already ready to un-hyphenate the last name but not pushing too hard about it yet.
There are twins in Hawaii's class named Ger/onimo and Kevin.
Sneaux is phenomenal. Putting it on the short list of middle names to give myself.
138: That's pretty good. There's a certain poetry to that pattern. "Hi, I'm Boadicea, and this is my sister Fran."
"Hi, I'm Snake River Canyon and this is brother Evel."
I like the idea of getting/choosing new, grownup names at some point.
I did totally revise my signature in adulthood. The old one looked like it was made up by a person in the act of learning cursive, which it was, so I just sat down and made up a new one sometime in my 20s. The new one is much better.
I will never have to name a human but am pretty good at cat names. Bave and I actually came up with the kitten's name independently somehow, and then ended up in that "oh everyone named their kid Henry" situation but it's still a good cat name.
AHIMSUB, we were aware of the Lily/Olivia/etc. trend for girl names, but we really were committed to Iris (not a pseud). Then followed about 3 anxious years of checking the SS charts to make sure that we weren't accidentally leading edge. But no, we've met roughly as many old people (expected) and peers of ours (not) as we have girls her age or younger with that name.
Come to think of it, I think we've met more young Kais in 8 years than Irises in 12. I mean, it's like 2:1, but still.
142.1: Yeah, I overhauled my signature in college for the same reason, I think at the very end. For awhile, my voter registration card didn't match my IRL sig, but I guess that got fixed along the line. Meanwhile, my signature has been deteriorating for some 20 years, to the point where it's not remotely decipherable.
For some reason, when we got our mortgage, they required me to sign with my middle initial, which I never, ever have, so each of the myriad times I had to sign, it was a stylized scribble, then a 3rd grade M, then another scribble. Absurd.
When we got our mortgage, the mortgage broker or somebody like that had the most complicated signature I had ever seen. I assumed it was a deliberate effort to make a hard to forge signature.
109: I'm surprised. Maybe this varies by state, maybe that specific change sets off alarms, or maybe you got a suspicious judge. I changed my name last year and there were a lot of forms to fill out, but I don't remember needing to have my wife sign anything (just having to send something to my creditors), and when I was asked for an explanation, spelling out the whole thing and saying I want to shorten it satisfied the judge.
My parents were on the leading edge of my name, but IIRC it went from ten-thousandth-most-common boy's name to thousandth-most-common, roughly speaking. It looks striking on the chart but I've only ever met two others.
144: Oh yeah, voter registration is the most important part of the name change I never finished. Somehow they screwed it up. Actually, the SSA screwed it up. When I was in the SSA getting it changed, I looked at the first draft of the form and had to say "no, this is wrong, you deleted the first part of the last name, you were supposed to delete the middle name and make the first part of the last name into a new middle name," so he did and that was that and I got the SS card right. But apparently he didn't fix that error everywhere because some months later I got a voter registration card with the wrong name in the mail.
I never got around to fixing it, but they let me vote in the primary anyway, so I figure I got around to it. Fortunately, it's still very nearly unique.
146 I also had to publish the change, with my birthdate and address, in the back of I don't remember, maybe the New York Press? Roughly equivalent to writing your phone number above a dive bar urinal. I got a few letters from prison.
I think according to statute they just needed extra documentation to be sure because he was better-looking than me.
If I knew someone named Jealousy, it would be really hard not to say "Hey Jealousy" every time I saw them.
I've always wanted to name my hypothetical daughter Gerd, but no one I've ever dated or married has been ok with that. I suggested compromising with Gerda, which is the name of my great aunt, but that has been shot down too.
I have a friend who had a daughter in 2010 or 2011 or so and named her Isis, and now he is seriously considering legally changing her name.
I've always liked my name, I was named after an 80 year old relative, and my name has continued plodding along as an old-fashioned-but-not-ridiculously-so name in the mother country. In the US it's not unheard of but it's ethnic enough that it means most people assume I'm foreign.
Also, I can't see the name Arya without thinking of Hindu nationalism.
132/150 is actually the original inspiration, which becomes obvious if you know that Jammies was in college 1995-1999.
152: Is your nom de unfogged after the Powerpuff Girl?
O.K., now I have a pretty good guess.
My boys have middle names on their English passports but not on their Japanese ones, as the Japanese family registration only permits one given and one family name. Japanese Anglicans adopt an additional Western name on baptism, usually a saint's, so I gave them their boring, biblical English middle names as their baptismal names. Friends have adopted a different solution by running Japanese and Western names together (think Angelanaoko or Hiroshiadam), which works fine when spoken and on their Japanese passports as they write it in Roman letters with a space, but looks really strange as a mixture of kanji and katakana on things like graduation certificates.
121: I think they got enough crap over C/hiv, (true story, his nickname is pronounced "shiv" and his dad works in the prison system, having started his career as a regular prison guard before moving up).
Anyway, for my niece they veered into just going for unspellable. They went with S/aiorse (pronounced seer-SHUH). I have never seen any member of the extended family (including my mother) spell it correctly. It's a pretty enough name, but the poor kid is going to be explaining it every damn day of her life. Speaking as someone with a traditional variant spelling of a common name that I stupidly changed to a non-standard version (in short form) at the age of 5, it's a pain in the ass.
I grew up with an "Elora" (cf. "Willow") and a former friend has a son named "Atreyu" ("Neverending Story"). No GoT names yet though.
159.2 -- were you aware that the anti-racist skinheads in Mpls in the 90's had a friendship youth guild called Saoirse Skins? They had spiffy embroidered bomber jackets too.
I was not--my only experience with the local skins was an ex-GF of a skin dating a buddy of mine and threatening to come on campus with his buds for a beatdown. Nothing happened, but it was a five minute kerfuffle.
Oh, and while both of my girls' first/middle pairings are fine, if we'd switched their middle names (older got my ex's sister's name, younger got my sister's name), the younger would have a Pixie's song title as a name, which would be pretty sweet.
162: YOU were friends with Dan S/immer?!?!
No. The skin in question was Hmong, I think. And it wasn't at the U.
163: You almost named your daughter Alec Eiffel?
In middle age, my uncle transitioned from "guy with weird Yiddish name" to "guy named after Japanese car company."
Schmuelbaru?
159.2: They'll be certainly explaining it--there was an interview on a late night show with the Irish actress with that name who was just nominated for an Oscar, and she was clearly a little embarrassed by it--but it's just "freedom" in Irish. That's an entirely regular spelling within the conventions of Irish.
Saoirse means freedom I think, and is apparently rather a political choice in Ireland these days. Although I don't entirely trust the Irish woman who told me that.
I'm still happy with my kids' names. Two of them have two middle names, and two have just the one, and sometimes I wonder whether we should have given them all the same, but I can't really care about it. I don't have a middle name, which I've never been bothered by, or at least, haven't been bothered since I read "Harriet the Spy".
My only hot take on all this is never name your kid "X Y Z" and call him or her "Y". Modern bureaucracy and crappy computer programs have made this a major PITA. First hand experience here as someone who used to think "OH WOW computers are going to make it so easy for people to know I go by my middle name and not my first name." Ah, the innocence of youth!
My kids both were early adopters of semi-trendy but not ridiculous first names. We thought we were oh so cool, but of course there are now zillions. One cannot win in these games, alas.
The way Sansa on GoT is evolving, she might be a better choice than Arya, who is basically a ninja serial killer at this point in the saga.
Unless you want your daughter to be a ninja serial killer: not judging!
Saoirse means freedom I think, and is apparently rather a political choice in Ireland these days.
It does mean liberty or freedom, I'm pretty sure. I think it's one of those Celtic-revival names that dates from the 1920s (so, yes: political) as an actual forename (if you're looking for an Irish great-great-great-granny who was born and baptized in the nineteenth century, you're not looking for a Saoirse, in other words). I think it's a lovely name, in any case.
I was named after my paternal grandmother. I sometimes wish I had a different, and less old-fashioned and obviously Catholic, name; but I do like having that connection to the familial past (especially since I never met my grandmother, who died years before I was born).
(My grandmother died of a "women's complaint," that, after much research and oral family history interviews, and so on and so forth, I have determined was almost certainly ovarian cancer. Apparently, this malady was too shameful to even name or mention back in the day when my grandmother died of it. One elderly cousin of my father told me that my grandmother "suffered greatly" in the last year of her life, but never failed to say the rosary. From this I was supposed to take comfort, I suppose, but it made me feel very sad and angry indeed.)
Although I don't entirely trust the Irish woman who told me that.
Probably wise.
I've seen one or two Saoirses in the wild, and they all seemed to have lefty-enough parents that it must've been a consciously political choice.
165: Interesting. There were a few skinheads of color in the scene that I knew, but I don't recall any of them being Hmong. Hmong kids in the cities now are mostly into breaking and bombing. (As, indeed, are most of the young men of every race who would perhaps have become skinheads in a different era.)
I've seen one or two Saoirses in the wild,
Eh, I've known a few Sinéads in my day, and also a couple of Siobháns, but I can honestly say that I've never known a Saoirse in the wild. I guess I don't get out much.
||
http://www.startribune.com/minnesota-health-plans-seek-big-premium-jumps/392058421/
Are people finally ready to admit that the ACA was just a big scam? This is in Minnesota, ferchrissakes, not Alabama or Mississippi. We already HAD extensive subsidized insurance options before Obama came along, but now most everybody is pretty fucked. As one of my marginally employed artist friends wrote recently "If you have insurance that doesn't HELP YOU, then you DON'T HAVE INSURANCE" (Except you still have to pay for it, of course. You always have to pay for it.)
||>
176: You needed to do this all Canada-style from the get-go, but the insurance industry was too powerful, and so you didn't.
Saoirse Ronan is so damn charming in Brooklyn. "Rhymes with inertia" is at least a quick mnemonic that makes it easy to remember how to pronounce (see her Colbert appearance).
I have nothing but respect and admiration for Colm Tóibín, whose work (with Diarmaid Ferriter) on the Irish Famine is squeamishly uncomfortable, and heart-stoppingly good. But Brooklyn strikes me as, I dunno, a little bit generic and uninteresting? I'm willing to be persuaded otherwise, though!
I suppose Brooklyn is a bit generic and uninteresting. But somehow it still works. Great cast, and I'm into Nick Hornby's totally unexpected second act writing quietly observed adapted movies about women (Wild was similarly much better than it had any right to be).
I feel like there are 100x as many Siobhans as Saiorses in the US. I've known* a bunch of the former but I think I've only ever met one of the latter.
*biblically
I feel like there are 100x as many Siobhans as Saiorses in the US. I've known* a bunch of the former but I think I've only ever met one of the latter.
*biblically
181 is exactly right. It was a surprisingly good movie.
I've known* a bunch of the former
You dog. My mother always warned me against the likes of you.
The clip in 178 is indeed quite charming. And useful!
178: Have I mentioned before that I see a certain comedian (no, I'm not naming names) every other Sunday or so, because he is a practicing Catholic, and we belong to the same parish? He goes downstairs for coffee and doughnuts after Mass, which I find quite charming. It's totally not cool to acknowledge his celebrity status, though, so he's just another suburban NJ dad, so far as I'm concerned.
I've only met one Saoirse. She came from a family where all the kids have Irish first names and Lord of the Rings middle names.
153. Agree.
I've never encountered a Saoirse, and I know a bunch of people who have Irish names because they're Irish. I don't think it's all that common in Ireland.
Saoirse is way less common than Sinéad. To people my generation and older it would have had that whiff-of-brimstone suggestion of Republicanism (Irish variety) but I think not so much any more. It differs from the Celtic-revival-era names (like Sinéad, Siobhán, Gráinne and indeed my own real name) in being a new creation rather than a resurrected old name.
The names I always fancied for my hypothetical children were Liadán and Macdara (note, girl and boy name respectively).
In many ways the most genuinely authentic Irish tradition, especially for women, is to be called by a totally different name to your legal name - Elizabeth Philomena known as Phyllis, Carmel known as May, Anne Bridget known as Bridie, and so on. I swear a majority of my female clients over 65 have these multiple names.
I didn't know that was just for women. In my family it was done for men because everybody was named "Michael Patrick".
My sister's ex came from one of those families. We knew him as 'Buck' (that is, same first name as Buck's real one), but a completely different first and middle.
100/180: see, I would have called that a traditional Danish gnome/name. (Also, I have a cousin just named "Nis", from one of the hyper traditionalist branches of the family.)
British baby names for 2015, just published. Amelia and Olivia win the girls by a country mile, while Oliver is about 27% ahead of the next one for boys.
192. That sounds confusing. Couldn't you just call him Bruce ?
191: In my own experience it's more so women but certainly, men as well. My favourite example is two brothers, one christened Michael John, known as "Johnny", and one christened John Michael, known as "Mick".
195: There was a six month period where my sister, I, and the high school friend of ours who introduced me to Buck were all married to men named (or at least called) Buck. It was puzzling, but it didn't last long.
196: We don't have anybody who goes by "Mick". What makes it even more complicated is that men in my family have tended to use their real names once they go out to college and work. So you'll have somebody who gets called "Pat" by everybody who knew him before 1980 and "Mike" by everyone who didn't. That later group would include Mike's wife.
Anyway, I'm not completely innocent of this. We named our son with the deliberate intention of calling him by his middle name.
Also, "John Michael" just flows wrong.
Saoirse
The Czech Republic wants its vowels back.
The information content of an Irish vowel is almost zero. On the other hand, an accent mark is worth maybe three letters.
180 is also the name of Norwegian Christmas gnomes.
I have a friend who has a classic European name that was not all that common in our generation in the US (not uncommon per se, more that she was usually the only person with her name in any given setting.) A recent royal baby was named this name, and now her name is skyrocketing in popularity, and will probably be #1 if it isn't already. Obviously there's a big enough generation gap that it won't matter all that much to her, but she's a little bit chuffed about it.
Also, I have a friend who works near the Swahili coast of Kenya, and his nickname sounds almost like the word for "penis" in Arabic. He gets made fun of a lot.
The information content of an Irish vowel is almost zero. On the other hand, an accent mark is worth maybe three letters.
A lot of the vowels are only there to indicate how to pronounce the consonants. But in some cases, and especially in older names (because not modernised by spelling reform*) many of the consonants are silent. Toirdhealbhach and Conchubhair, I'm looking at you here.
Which of them is pronounced "Chumly"?
202: I think I've mentioned it before, but a friend of mine swears she went to school (in India) with a guy whose name is pronounced Ah-nahl Dukshut but spelled Anal Dikshit.
Growing up I had a Chinese/Burmese neighbor named Num Kok Wee. He had to have an unlisted phone number.
Also, our class president in 7th grade was Dung Ho, but strangely enough no middle schoolers gave her crap about it, perhaps because she had a fairly formidable personality. We also had a pretty large Asian student body.
203: I think it's a really cool system, but it has a lot of redundancy. That's not inherently bad; caol le caol means it's usually easy to correct spelling mistakes. But it does make words rather long, which I find amusing given how important the smallest piece of typography, the accent mark, matters to pronunciation.
I'm very thankful for the spelling reform and the Caighdeán. Those older forms are not friendly to the learner.
There are a few edge cases I'm not great on yet, though, mainly with endings of some verb forms. And I definitely haven't internalized the way is pronounced in the future/conditional tenses, e.g. "caithfidh". But in general it's a very regular and I find aesthetically pleasing system, even though it's so unintuitive to English speakers. (In the sense that a naive English speaker's pronunciation of an Irish word would be much more off than their pronunciation of a French, German, or even Japanese in romaji word.)
My favourite example is two brothers, one christened Michael John, known as "Johnny", and one christened John Michael, known as "Mick".
This actually sort of makes sense (or at least, doesn't sound totally weird) to me.
In my family, there was a trend, from the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s, of giving a boy a middle name after the Irish rebel leader Robert Emmet. Nobody in my family tree who was born and baptized in the 1850s, 60s, 70s, or 80s was ever named 'Emmet.' But for about 30 years or so, in the late -19th- to early 20th-centuries, I find the names Patrick Emmet and Joseph Emmet and so on, turning up with notable frequency. The thing is, these folks were basically lumberjacks in the backwoods of Canada, and by all accounts illiterate. And yet, they seem to have been tapping into some of the political trends back in Ireland.
And for female children, there was a trend toward "Loreto" or "Loretto" as a middle name. Because why not name your child after a religious congregation? So one of my great-grandmothers was "Bridget Loreto," for example.
I knew a whole town named after Emmet. With its own legend. Granted, a very small town and a pun-based legend, but still.