Lois’s answer to “My children are Elli and Miles (born '95 and '98) ;-) It wasn't deliberate, but we realised after t…” > Likes and Comments
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An unusual name is likely to be a burden to a child. I think the safest policy is to keep it short and fairly common. You can award multiple names. If you call your son John Penric, for example, he can be John at school and change to Penric later, if he fancies it.
@Jonathan Eh, it depends. I hated having a less common name and less common spelling of it when I was little and wondered why I couldn't have a name like "Emily" or "Britney" (popular names at the time), but I like it now that I'm older. I'd much rather have my name than have the same one as 25 other people I know. My husband was the third of his name in his family, which was difficult for him as a kid. So we've opted for more obscure names for our children.
As I already said, the obvious solution is to give your children multiple names, common and less common, so that they can choose for themselves which they prefer. But it is obviously and unnecessarily confusing to have multiple instances of the same name in one family. I might have had the same name as my father and grandfather (William), but my mother put a stop to that.
A super popular name has the danger of dating people.
The last name plays into this: If the family name is super common, a somewhat uncommon first name may be better. Within reason, though. To name a boy after the (Orthodox) saint Galacteon would be a problem, although not as bad as naming him 'Sue'. St Galacteon's wife, by the way, is St Episteme. So if you have a boy & a girl...
To my 10-year-old niece, Penric and Desdemona might be less remarkable than, say, Mary. To some degree, there ain't no such thing as a popular name anymore. :)
Someone put together a graph for the sake of a pun, but it includes the interesting little nugget that the name "Miles" increases in popularity after the Vorkosigan books were first published (the very big spike being after "Into the Spiderverse" with Miles Morales as Spidey). https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/statu...
People who study these things still haven't figured out if these kinds of correlations are because authors are likely to follow the same trends as parents for naming, or because parents are influenced by popular media. It's probably at least a little of both.
We have a granddaughter named Ekaterin, which is a lovely name. May she be as smart and feisty as the character for whom she is named!
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Jonathan
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Sep 02, 2020 02:06AM
An unusual name is likely to be a burden to a child. I think the safest policy is to keep it short and fairly common. You can award multiple names. If you call your son John Penric, for example, he can be John at school and change to Penric later, if he fancies it.
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@Jonathan Eh, it depends. I hated having a less common name and less common spelling of it when I was little and wondered why I couldn't have a name like "Emily" or "Britney" (popular names at the time), but I like it now that I'm older. I'd much rather have my name than have the same one as 25 other people I know. My husband was the third of his name in his family, which was difficult for him as a kid. So we've opted for more obscure names for our children.
As I already said, the obvious solution is to give your children multiple names, common and less common, so that they can choose for themselves which they prefer. But it is obviously and unnecessarily confusing to have multiple instances of the same name in one family. I might have had the same name as my father and grandfather (William), but my mother put a stop to that.
A super popular name has the danger of dating people.
The last name plays into this: If the family name is super common, a somewhat uncommon first name may be better. Within reason, though. To name a boy after the (Orthodox) saint Galacteon would be a problem, although not as bad as naming him 'Sue'. St Galacteon's wife, by the way, is St Episteme. So if you have a boy & a girl...
To my 10-year-old niece, Penric and Desdemona might be less remarkable than, say, Mary. To some degree, there ain't no such thing as a popular name anymore. :)
Someone put together a graph for the sake of a pun, but it includes the interesting little nugget that the name "Miles" increases in popularity after the Vorkosigan books were first published (the very big spike being after "Into the Spiderverse" with Miles Morales as Spidey). https://twitter.com/lunasorcery/statu...People who study these things still haven't figured out if these kinds of correlations are because authors are likely to follow the same trends as parents for naming, or because parents are influenced by popular media. It's probably at least a little of both.
We have a granddaughter named Ekaterin, which is a lovely name. May she be as smart and feisty as the character for whom she is named!
