I know several people who are currently pregnant. I help them out by suggesting baby names for their coming children, and they regularly ignore my advice. Never you mind that all my suggestions are variations of my own name. Those just happen to be the names I feel their children would like to have.
I'm entirely qualified to provide excellent baby names, because I've read Freakonomics, which includes a FASCINATING chapter on names. An excerpt of the chapter is here on Slate.
I, personally, have a very lovely name. I was not always fond of it, though. When I was about 4-years-old, I was enamored of the TV show Diff'rent Strokes and I wanted to be named Kimberly after the sister. I made my sister help me make little notes that said Call me Kimberly, and I handed them to people when they called me by name. At least, that's how I remember it. At the age of four, my social circle couldn't have been very wide, though, so I was probably just walking around my house handing the papers to my parents and siblings.
Later, in the 4th and 5th grade, I loved completely made up names with lots of ms and ls. I made lists of potential baby names and names for the characters in the many books and stories I was writing. Lovely, fancy names like Milotia Dawn. Yep, that was my favorite one. All the girls had Dawn for a middle name, because it was the name of one of the characters in the girlwithcancer books I was reading at the time. And all the girls had names that started with m. Melody if they were lucky and Milotia if they weren't. It's a good thing 5th graders rarely get to name babies.
3 comments:
I seem to remember someone suggesting Maryo Eli for a boy . . . has that caught on yet?
Not yet, but its day is coming.
My middle name is Dawn, and I never found it particularly romantic or wistful.
In fact, I once told my mom I didn't like it and made her cry. I bet the girls in the cancer books never did that.
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