How Did/Will You Name Your Kids?

[billd91]

For our first kid, we didn't know what the sex was going to be but my wife had very definite ideas on what to name her if she turned out to be a girl. She wanted to name her Holly Elizabeth after her oldest childhood friend (they had known each other since they were 9 months old, so a 29 year friendship). I wanted a good Irish name like Maura. For boys names, we were a little fuzzier but both liked Conor.
Turned out to be a girl and after the 36 hours of labor, I relented on the name to my wife's choice.

For our second kid, we told the ultrasound tech that it was OK to determine the baby's sex since we had already gone through the process of surprise with the first one. Turns out this one was a boy. Our first choice of names had changed over the years to Aiden, but Aiden has been wildly popular lately. I attribute this to the character in Sex in the City, but I'm not positive. So we decided we wanted something else. The middle name was already set at William because that's my name and that's been the growing family tradition: the son gets his dad's name as his middle name.
One day, my wife stumbles on a name and emails me. It's one we hadn't thought of, is a little unusual but is kind of nice and cool. We talk about it with other people and their reactions are all the same: a little surprise, but ultimately thinking the name is kind of cool. So we ran with it. We named him Griffin and, while a bit different, it just kind of works. He just turned 1 year old a month ago and is going strong. We even got a Folkmanis puppet for him that's a griffon, and it's almost as big as he is.

 

[Agback]

one thing i've never understood about western naming conventions is the middle name. in my culture, your middle name is your father's name, or your husband's name. and it's pretty much never ever referred to. Is there some significance to western middle names?

There have from time to time been several different significances in various Western cultures.

At one time in France it was illegal to have a middle name. People got around this by hyphenating several names into one and making the compound the first name.

At one stage canon law allowed the priest performing a baptism to insert teh name of a saint or prophet as a middle name if he felt tht teh name given by the godparents was not sufficiently Christian.

And at one stage people started out without a middle name, but when they went through the ceremony of confirmation they chose a patron saint and the saint's nae was inserted as their middle name.

In my family it was for some time customary for boys to be given their paternal grandmother's maiden name as a middle name. My relatives have thus ended up with such middle names as 'Ariel', 'Heyward', 'Ledyard', 'Stothert', and 'Strathern'. Fortunately, my brothers and I escaped 'Hewitt', and I have no intention of giving any sons I might have the middle name 'Paull'.

 

[Pbartender]

I felt duty-bound to give my children names that wouldn't cause them to hate me when I grew up.

We wanted mainstream names with short nicknames. We went with Samantha and Maxwell. I wanted Maximillian...

This about how we looked at it too... So many of my contemporaries go by their middle names, because their parents insisted on giving them an embarrassingly "original" or "unusual" first name.

Our surname is unusual enough that my kids didn't need unusual first names, and I never wanted them to be ashamed of what we named them...

David Matthew and Katherine Elizabeth.

No particular reason... The names just suited them.

 

[Desdichado]

She was named by hippies and while I think her name (Morgana Talltree) is completely wicked, she had to endure a lot of teasing growing up.

Yes. Thank you. Morgana is a female name. Morgan is not That is a personal pet peeve of mine; my wife really wants to name another daughter Morgan (not that we have any plans to have any more kids, but my wife did miscarry a few months ago; she'd be 8½ months pregnant right now if she hadn't) and I keep insisting that we're not giving any girls a boy's name. Or vice versa for that matter.

The one interesting thing about my daughters name is that we always envisioned that we would call her "Sam" for short but since day one she has been a "Samantha" and we've never taken to shortening it.

For some reason my dad always shortened my sister's name to "Bantha." I don't remember him doing this before Star Wars came out (although I was only five when it came out; maybe he did and I just don't remember it). I'm not quite sure how you get from Samantha to Bantha, but I always thought that was kinda funny. Especially considering that my dad claims to hate kitschy nicknames--everyone in my family goes by their full first name, at least among family. Nobody calls me Josh; it's always Joshua. Yet somehow, my sister was always Bantha to my dad.

Granted, none of the rest of us called her that, though.

 

[Queen_Dopplepopolis]

I have two girlfriends named Morgan... I've always thought of it as a girls name (but then, I've known one female Morgan for my entire life...

 

[Desdichado]

You're not helping, QueenD!

 

[reveal]

You're not helping, QueenD!

I got your back.

http://www.medievalscotland.org/problem/names/morgan.shtml

Morgan

This name is the crux of much confusion, and it will surpise many people to learn that the common given name Morgan is entirely unrelated to the Arthurian Morgain.

The Welsh given name Morgan derives from a hypothetical Common Celtic *Moricantos, with the first element probably meaning "sea" but the second element uncertain. It appears in Old Welsh as Morcant (pronounced "mo:r-GANT"), in Early Medieval Welsh as Morgant (pronounced "MO:R-gan" -- the "t" is most likely silent by this time), and in later Medieval Welsh as Morgan, the same form it has in Modern Welsh. [Bartrum, Bromwich]

In pre-modern records, the name Morgan is always masculine. It had a modest popularity in medieval Wales, neither one of the favorite names nor particularly rare. In the 20th century, the name is commonly used in the USA by women as well as men. I don't know whether this is also true in Britain. Modern Welsh name books still consider the name exclusively masculine. [Gruffudd]

At various times, the origin and meaning of the name has been popularly misinterpreted. During the Puritan period it was misunderstood as meaning "sea-born" (the same meaning as Morien below) and it was used to translate the name Pelagius in the Book of Common Prayer. [Withycombe] In the 16th century there are examples of the name as a surname being spelled Morgaine or Morgayne [Morgan & Morgan] in English contexts, which may be due to a confusion with the literary name Morgain (q.v.).

This name was in ordinary use prior to 1600, but only as a man's name.

Emphasis added.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

For my wife and I, it was fairly simple. For a girl, there was a name that I always liked and had said I would like to use for my daughter. Coincidentally, my wife wanted to use the same name, but for her it was a tribute to her cousin who died of cancer many years ago.

For a boy, my wife wanted to name him after me, but I've always hated the "Jr." thing, so we decided we would reverse my middle and first names.

Of course now, should we decide to have a third child, we will be stuck trying to figure something out for both a boy and girls name since we've used the easy options.

 

[JimAde]

I'm not quite sure how you get from Samantha to Bantha, but I always thought that was kinda funny.

Probably via a little kid (you, maybe?) with a head cold:

Samanthana -> 'Mantha (little kid pronunciation) -> Bantha (Head cold)

Makes perfect sense to me.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

After going down a long list of names we basically eliminated all the ones we didn't like. As an aside, I ran down ex-girlfriend's names past my wife without telling her that they were ex-girlfriends. Anyway, we came up with the following list:

Sarah Elizabeth (her choice)
Hannah Jane (my choice)
Madaline (her choice, no middle name)

Madaline was out because I couldn't pronouce it to her satisfaction. So that left Sarah and Hannah. Sarah had a strike against it because Sarah is also the name of one of our cats. Hannah had a strike against it because "Hannah Jane" is the name of a song by Hootie and the Blowfish and my wife was appalled by that notion.

Anyway, the pregnacy was a rough one. My wife ended up spending six weeks in the hospital. When the baby was finally born, I was led off to the ward to name the baby. My wife was exauhsted and didn't care at that point. My baby girl's eyes looked exactly like her mother's so I felt that was a sign and named her Sarah Elizabeth.

A week later Sarah's eyes lighted up and now look like mine. So we figure that she just really liked the name Sarah and came out with dark eyes just to make sure I wouldn't screw up and name her wrong.

All of which is a long winded way of saying we named her after the cat.