Naming Names Part 2
Posted: May 11, 2005 Filed under: Uncategorized 20 Comments »Remember when I told you about the guy who hates the name we like for a girl so much that he had to yell at us about it?
Well, their baby was born on Mother’s Day.
I have been waiting impatiently for them to announce their baby boy’s name because I am SUCH a huge Naming Dork that I needed to know what he thought was A)appropriately masculine and B) not too weird for him.
The answer: a name we can’t stand.
Fortunately he is absolutely fricking adorable. He has that great two-weeks-late-ness about him so he doesn’t look so much like a larvae. So we will try not to laugh when they say his name.
But I was driven to my Naming Mecca, the Baby Name Wizard (all who haven’t must play with the Name Voyager), where she announced in her blog that the 2004 Social Security Name Statistics were released. Hurrah! What fun!!
Search the list of the top 1000 for a name you like!
Notice the myriad ways people are spelling Isabel/Isabella/Isobel/Isabela/Isobella/Isobela/Isabelle and Madison/Madisen/Madisyn and Jayden/Jaden/Jaiden/Caiden/Haiden/Aiden!
Gawk at the names that hundreds of people chose for their twins (not surprisingly, they match!) Folks who like the trendy popular give them both trendy popular names like Olivia and Sophia, folks who enjoy biblical go with Hannah and Sarah, folks who want to spend their lives calling for the wrong child in a mouthful of mixed-up mumble use Mia and Mya)!
You can also see the popularity of a name by decade.
You can, for example, discover that their name is slightly less popular than our boy name.
Which… flummoxes me. I can’t decide what I think about this.
We want to be extremely unusual. We will be. There are only 2,000 or so boys born since 2000 with this name. If we have a girl, there will be virtually no girls with the name we have chosen but it is creeping up the ranks for boys. This means there are about a hundred out there somewhere, probably.
While Roy is not popular, it once was. Enter it in the Name Voyager and you see a plummoting graph for the past 100 years. No doubt about it. It’s a dying name.
And maybe I’m a little bit jealous.
You see, neither my name nor Wes’ has ever been in the top 1000 names at all….
But then, we have a Gargantuan Teenage ManBoy with a name that is uncommon but not unheard-of
and we have never, ever met another kid with his name.
So I guess it will all be OK.
Roy?
That poor, poor boy. In twenty years he will either be selling used cars or doing dinner theater.
Roy. Does it at least meld well with the surname? ‘Cause Roy is gonna get some ass whoop unleashed on him around middle school I suspect.
Roy. I can’t imagine looking at my newborn child and declaring, “Roy. He’s, without a shadow of doubt, Roy.”
F.Y.I. Bri, your boy name is the name of my Ex boyfriend’s band…and the name was used on Sex and the City, so it may become more popular. It’s a cute name, though!
“That poor, poor boy. In twenty years he will either be selling used cars or doing dinner theater.”
Or Roy could be inventing really cool and mind blowing aviation technology, have a deep appreciation and love for modern poetry,and be a warm and caring human like my father, Roy.
Or perhaps he could be part of a self-congratulatory circle of blogging yuppies-in-denial who are far too ready to judge other people for what are essentially personal choices. I’ve always felt that everyone has a right to look askance at other people’s baby names but not to sneer. Aside from it being unbecoming it’s none of our business. How do we know the most intimate descision processes and emotional weight of names that lead to one or another moniker?
Yours in a huff,
Wisdom “My middle name is Percy- make whatever sport of that you will” Weasel.
Sorry Weasel, truly. It was bound to offend someone since it’s totally a NORMAL sort of DAD name. It’s just not a 2005 BABY sort of name. Here, I mean. In New York. Maybe in Maine and Mighty Britannia it is going strong. More power to it…. Long live Roy! And Percy!
(My little brother went through a long Thomas the Tank Engine phase in which he had to be called Percy – we even have preschool drawings with the name Percy on the back instead of his actual name, so it is close to my heart.)
And I have to admit that Used Car Salesman was the first thing I thought of, Bill, because their last name, while not pronounced the same, is the name of a car. It’s inevitable.
You wanna name your baby Big after Chris Noth’s character?
And thanks for giving me HOURS of fun with the name voyager!
Bill points out that by comparing the ranges for the last three years, one can still find our Boy Name. I think, sadly, it may be moot because Wes has been calling me all day with new names. He was wavering slightly before. The “Sex and the City” thing just sent him over the edge.
It’s sooooo annoying having to compromise….. ack.
Oh yes. One other thing, Weasel.
I believe it was already revealed yesterday by Julie’s earth-shattering-ly revelatory pronouncement (that we are “So Park Slope”) that we are, indeed, yuppie-ish. Certainly that’s something it would be hard for Wes and I to deny.
Self-congratulatory… well, perhaps. I think it’s hard to find a group of friends who aren’t, really. All groups have their standards and jokes. We enjoy picking on many things about one another, including one another’s naming choices.
While you may consider naming to be off-limits-personal, I think commentary is inevitable – if they were changing their own names to Roy, I would keep my comments to myself (well, maybe I would). But a baby is a whole separate person who will be living with that name. It’s about more than just you.
That said, I am perfectly aware that Wes’ and my choices are controversial and will invite plenty of commentary in their own right. Obviously, we will deal with that as needed.
And we will hope that Roy’s parents don’t stumble upon this website.
Really, Weasel, my middle name is Russell. Which is about as dumb a name as you can have. And the whole of my name is the same as my father’s name, and he’s not exactly a man I’d like to emulate.
It was a joke.
And, of course, the thing that Roy puts me most in mind of is the classic Jim Croce song, “Rapid Roy, That Stock Car Boy.”
Rapid Roy that stock car boy/He’s too much to believe/You know he’s always got an extra pack of cigarettes/rolled up in his t-shirt sleeve/Got a tattoo on his arm that say “Baby”/Got another one that just say “Hey”/Every Sunday afternoon/he is a dirt track demon/In a ‘57 Chevrolet
So there you have it.
It wasn’t a joke, it was a sneer. But lets not fight. Mrs. Weasel and I have already picked out Alistair (for a boy) and Scout (for a girl) so we are in the proverbial glass house when it comes to throwing stones. I was advocating Anuerin for a boy but was (probably wisely) overruled. Sometimes I do scratch my head and wonder at name choices (some friends up here recently produced a “Rex”, and another had an “Iris”[ok] who would have been a “Bass”[odd] if male) but as Bri so rightly points out, you all are in NY, NY and standards and mores vary from place to place. Its just funny to see this dialogue going on when as a child in the UK I was brought up believing that all Americans had odd names like “Lyndon”, “Oral”, “Miss Ellie” and “Hiram”. Its a case of plus ca change, plus la meme chose.
And as I live in an agreeably arty town on the Maine coast, drink imported tea, and am off to the Cape for the weekend I can hardly claim to be less yuppier than thou.
The epic’s end draws close; just wanted to ask if anyone saw the sidebar in the Atlantic this month drawn from Freakonomics that compared the earning potential and socio-economic messages of various names? Apparently, “Amber” should be avoided if future child prosperity is hoped for….
make fun of each other all you like, but i just don’t see anything the least bit laughable about “Roy.” the existence of Roy Horn doesn’t attach any sort of comedy or piteousness to it for me. it doesn’t even rhyme with any bodily functions or fluids. i mean… it’s practically “Ray.” plus, there’s Rob Roy, the Scottish hero and the delicious coctail.
the only way i foresee pre-/pubescent issues is if the kid’s a real Nancy. but the monicker “Roy” doesn’t make you a Nancy. your parents do.
I did! I know about that article! But the methods used for that (and one other bit of info in that Freak book) may be faulty, according to my naming guru over at babynamewizard.com. Click on the Name News and go to the blog – she had an excellent couple of entries commenting on and disputing that stuff.
And Weasel… Aneurin had long been one of our favorite choices that we are currently revisiting in our new search!! We like Ny for short. Wes has Welsh blood in him. I do worry about the lifelong pronunciation issues, but then my full name is perfectly clear and people mispronounce it anyway, so there you have it.
Oh, and Weasel, I like your names.
Roy for me conjures:
Siegfried and Roy
Roy G. Biv (the way to remember the colors in the rainbow)
Roy Rogers
And I don’t who Roy Horn is.
As for Rob Roy…. may explain a lot. That sort of masculine war kind of stuff may have been what pulled them to it. Hm….
You should all know that Wes’ and my naming technique involves this:
A) pretty much any name that conjures up much of ANYTHING is OUT (unless it holds some sort of meaning to us)
B) I am determined not to use any name of any kid I have ever taught (and the number of kids I’ve taught is somewhere around 600 now).
We have 3 state seperation; go for it.
Siegfried Fischbacher & Roy Horn
Weasel. What the fuck is wrong with Lyndon?
Well, obviously Fischbacher has been sitting there just waiting for us. I think we have a winner…!
i hate to harp but…
Roy Hobbs, main character in The Natural (the best baseball movie of all time), played by a heart-achingly beautiful, middle aged Robert Redford.
Bowlesy, nowt wrong with Lyndon; it just makes me think of men who pick dogs up by their ears.
More name posts! They are like baseball to listmaker!
Don’t forget Roy Cohen, commie hunter and closet case.
Oh, and I kept forgetting to point out the number one reason why this particular name is fair game for Wes and I – it’s because the dad of Roy sooooo did it to us first, calling our girl name tantamount to child abuse, if memory serves. That was just too low. He had to know that we were going to HATE any name he could come up with after such a display.