Here is baby naming advice on found on another website. I do not endorse anything listed below - do not shoot the messenger if your name is a location, a stripper name, spelled funny, and difficult to pronounce.
· Always give a child a middle name that they can resort to when they decide they don't like their first name.
· Names should be easy to spell, even for people who have never seen them. You should be able to instinctively spell it just by hearing it (unlike, say, "Oissubke"). No child ever thanked his or her parents for using a "creative" spelling.
· Similarly, names should be easy to pronounce. When the person interviewing you for a job gets corrected for saying the first thing out of their mouth (your name), it can hurt the interview.
· Names should always have a reasonably good nickname form. If you name a kid "Mordecai", know that you're going to start calling him "Moe" after about the third time you say it.
· Don't use last names (e.g., MacKenzie, Madison, etc.) as first names, especially for girls. It’s confusing.
· Run the "secretary of state test" on baby names: i.e., imagine how it would sound to have a news anchor read the now-adult child's name out in a serious context like "Today at the United Nations, Secretary of State [Brandy Alexandra Jones] condemned Iraq's stance...."
· Run the “Map Location” test. If your baby name is a commonly known location, scrap it. Dakota and Sierra are much better place names than people names.
· Run the “Stripper Test”. If your baby name sounds like a stripper's stage name, ditch it. Hunter, Cheyenne, Britney, you know the drill. People will be taken less seriously if their names sound like a stage name.
· Locate the top ten names for the prior year from the Census web site – and don’t use those. Naming is part of self-identity, and having 10 other kids with your name damages your self-identity.
