A Boy for Dad

Harry is a nice name.

Proofreaders: what I meant was “So are . . . “

We weren’t among those who said “a boy for dad”, right?
Before Tomás was born, some graduate students suggested “Godzilla Awesome Superman”. You can have it if you want.

My son (15) has a friend named Henry. So it hasn’t disappeared entirely. And there’s a little Clement down the street (the dad is English.) But I assume your wife is American? There are lots of names that sound perfectly respectable to an Englishman but are more or less ludicrous to an American. Nigel is tops on that score, but Reginald and Alfred (and Archibald, Derek, Graham, Leslie, and many others) are on the list. To an American, the bearers of these names are all winners of the Monty Python silly walks contest. (Monty makes the list, too.) So you need something trans-Atlantic.

What about William? William Brighouse is four-square and solid with just a hint of swing. I vote for William.

Or Adrian? Roll Adrian Brighouse around on your tongue. It feels good, doesn’t it? Captain of industry, popular novelist, emeritus professor – it fits them all. Adrian Brighouse has a stirling future.

Other possibilities: Geoffrey, Alexander, Simon, Timothy, Charles, Alan, Thomas.

And certain Celtic names are very fashionable. Owen, Kevin, Evan, Duncan, Keiran. So if you’ve got a Scotsman in your family tree you can go ethnic.

Congratulations to you, your wife and your two very lucky girls.

Holofernes

I might suggest; Clinton, Frederick, Charles, Jonathan.

In real life some people tend to have a fairly strong reaction to my name(Grant Clinton Austin). They draw all kinds of crazy conclusions and say it sounds certain ways. E.g., like a movie star’s name.

Good luck.

Assimilate! Kurt. Dale. Eric. Kenseth. And of course, Brett. (The alliteration is a feature, not a bug.)

Seriously, congratulations!

Harry is an excellent name, apparently, for a future professional sportsman. Which is why my hubby has it earmarked for a future kid. I’m an Emma and it seems that every second infant I come across has my name. It’s out of hand.

Just don’t pick Aidan. Same deal as Emma, there.

My suggestion is to get extraordinarily drunk, get into a fistfight at a bar (or, even better, the county fair or a bowling alley) and tape yourself swearing…… and utilize a long section for your son’s name……

dissolve to 19 years from now
setting: courtroom

An extremely dissheveled strung-out young man with tears all over his dirty clothing is testifying to the judge:

“Yes, your Honor my real first name my parents gave IS “MotherFuckerStupidAssholeAssholeYourMmmm-motherSucksHorseCockYeahYeahYouandWhatFuckinArmyGimmeAnotherBarkeepGimmeAnotherBitchYeahSuckOnThisBadBoyFuckFucFuckYouAssholes””
———————————————-
or Tractor. Always liked Tractor.

When I was a baby, my four year old brother insisted on calling me “Otto,” though it never really stuck. He was probably just carrying on the family tradition of love for Prussian statesmen: my great-grandfather was named “Wilhelm” after the Kaiser. (and no, he was not German, he was Norwegian.)

Lots of countries have rules and regulations about what you may or may not call your child. At work recently I came across the interesting fact that UK law lets you do what you like as long as it meets two requirements. 1)it mustn’t be short enough to fit the available space on a handwritten birth certificate 2)it must be decent enough to be sent through the post without contravention of the Obscene Publications Act. So Burrittoboy’s suggestion would be rejected by the registrar.

I have hear of one girl recently called Ikea … . And our databases are having all sorts of difficulty with names created with a mixture of numerals and letters (how about Twola spelt 2la). But there you go …

ah…perhaps horatio is more your style.

I always thought Richard was a really great name for a boy.

The popularity of the name “Adolf” really fell off mid-20th century.

If we accept that alliteration is a feature not a bug (as per the above comment) then how about Brian?

I agree with Ben Wolfson about the strangest part of the post.;)

So has anyone NOT looked up their own name? I looked up Esther, and surprisingly found out that at the end of the 19th century it was used as a boy’s name in some (few) instances.

And no, the tool does not necessarily crash Firefox, works just fine for me.

1) Initial consonant alliteration is a bug. No Bruce, Brian or Benjamin.

2) Alliteration of the vowel is a feature. Dylan, William.

3) Thre syllables have a slight advantage over two. Adrian, Anthony – hey, you think your wife would accept Alistair?

Millicent is good. And Derek is a fine boy’s name in the US. If a future Hall of Fame shortstop can wear it with pride in the most American of cities, New York, then it’s good, amen.

I personally favor Milo. also, Jasper. I used to know a guy named Browning Wesley Porter, and that is pretty much the kick-assest name ever. Browning. seriously awesome. then again, as you may know, people in my family are named Stuyvesant (as a first name) so I may have been knocked off course at some point.

Where’s the popularity list on that site?

My three boys each have a Western and a (Taiwanese) aboriginal name:
David Byah
William Eki
Jordan Lamai

plus their official Chinese names (we live in Taiwan)
If I’d known how their size and personality were going to turn out, I’d have called them Adam, Hoss, and Li’l Joe

34 – “Derek Jeeter” would be a laughable name if it weren’t attached to Derek Jeeter. There was a kid in my jr high named Spotwood Quimby, but since he could tear the head off anyone in the school nobody thought that “Spot” was a particularly funny nickname. The daughter of fellow I know is named Matilda but she’s so jaw-dropping beautiful that her name sounds like the angels singing to all the boys.

But it’s a mistake to go out of your way to choose a peculiar name in hopes that your kid can rise above it. Johnny Cash wrote a song about that.

(and PS, 35, for the son of a sturdy yeoman like Harry Brighouse, John with an h is just fine.)

When I first found that Flash toy, I remember looking at names beginning with different letters of the alphabet, and noticed an odd pattern: for both boys and girls (but especially for girls, I think), the vowels were most popular as initial letters about 100 years ago, dropped off in popularity around mid-century and then started to come back; whereas the hardest-sounding consonants peaked around 1960 and dropped off after that. I am sure that something can be said about the Zeitgeist from this, but I am not sure what.

Since the news is public, congratulations in public!

When we were thinking about a name for our son last year, we heard a story about some people (I think it were some group of Inuit, but I am not sure) who have a rule that your child should be given a name which is not the name of any one close to the parents, hence not the name of the parent themselves, or of a grandfather/mother, aunt/uncle, close friend etc. etc. The idea would be to regard the child as someone who is straight from the beginning seen as in individual in her own right.

We liked that symbolism very much — and choose accordingly. Other “criteria” that we used was that it had to be an “international” name (since we are a bi-national family and friends are dispersed everywhere) and it had to fit well with his familyname. Once we decided on the familyname, we quickly found a first name that fitted well esthetically (in our view at least) and that does not remind us of anyone we know.

Interesting to see that some of the previous posts *assume* that your child will be called Brighouse rather than his mother’s surname or both hyphenated, or something else…

Too much to respond to all of it. Adrian is among the rejcted names; it has a sentimental place for me, and if it were in the running I’d go for it. I like the idea of place names on the Isle of Man!

The last name will be “Brighouse Mother’sLastName”, non-hyphenated. In practice, the absence of a hyphen means that “Mother’sLastName” is the name is assumed to be the only last name (we know this from our existing kids). I understand that when hyphenating the standard practice is MotherLAstName-FathersLastName, but we didn’t know thatm and anyway, in our case MothersLAstName Brighouse sounded marginally sillier than Brighouse MothersLastName.

I’m surprised it took 40 comments before anyone mentioned Johnny Cash, though. Apparently Richard Wollheim had the same theory (RW was an undergraduate teach of mine, who was subseuqently, if briefly, a colleague, but I didn’t really know him, but a current colleague told me that RW expounded the theory that since your kid is bound to be teased for something, you should give them a strange name so that it would be that, and not something more personal, that they’d be teased about).

Mine’s number 2 for my birth decade, but my parents thought they were being pretty original with it.

I’m told that my parents were being original when they were naming my sister. They picked an older name that had fallen into disuse but which they really liked, so her name would have an exotic, if antiquated, flair. They named her Jennifer.

Three months later, Love Story came out. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s annoying when people call me “Harold”. I’m not a harold. I don’t want to be “old”. I think it’s a slightly ugly name, and going from the statistics, many people agree with me…

Good thing my parents had the sense to give me the norwegian version.

Congratulations!

WE had a much easier time picking a girl’s name than a boy’s name, and I had a few observations on the stats, most of which came down to the fact that people (us included!) are much much more conservative with boys’ names than girls’ names.

Hence the observation above that boys’ names are either vanilla or totally off-the-wall weird.

Jennifer isn’t old-fashioned, according to the popularity graph linked in the post. It was completely unheard of before the 40s, unless it was current sometime before 1880. Ranked 206 in the 40s, 98 in the 50s, 20 in the 60s, and 1 in the 70s.

Mine was also ranked number two the decade *before* I was born. To be fair, I doubt my parents knew very many ten year olds at the time.

Also according to the chart, a considerably larger number of boys have names in the top 1000 than do girls for 2004. I assume this means more variations on spelling or completely off-the-wall names.

The overall trend also appears to be “more creativity”, in that fewer and fewer names are being chosen out of the top 1000.

“Malcom” or “Vincent”

There is a place where these names are considered “cool?”

First of all accept my congratulations! Proud moment for both of u. In between this proud moment there is certain confusion. Let it not hamper your joy. U would certainly come up with some good names,there is still time.But i don’t think that there is any problem with the names u have suggested. Be patient!

My great-grandmother, Celeste, had three children, a boy and two girls. The boy was called Quentin and the girls were Katherine and Rachel (Rachel was my grand-mother). So for boys’ name I have a particular fondness for Quentin but I also like Dominique, Pascal and Didier.

Never had a chance to use any of them because my Frenchlings were little girls (and are now in the process of becoming young women).

We had two things in mind when we named our ladies: the first was to come up with names that wouldn’t be ridiculous in French or English, the second was to do honor to the women ancestors from BOTH sides and from BOTH countries (US and France). And so my eldest is Elizabeth Marie-Celeste and my youngest is Jessica Irène-Rachel.