Power of a Name

One of my favorite things about having kids (and, silly as it sounds, one of the hardest things to let go of when we decided not to have any more) is naming them. It's a huge undertaking, but so meaningful. I'm not sure what it is about naming children (and pets, electronics, cars, etc) that speaks to me, but I know I'm not alone.

In nearly every culture, every religion, names are considered powerful and sacred, or at the very least, meaningful. In Korea, names are never to be written in red ink, because the color is associated with death and doing so would bring bad luck¹. In the Old Testament, G-d frequently changed a person's name to signify His promises to that person². For Navajos, names are so precious and powerful as to only be used during ceremonies³. Wiccans and Catholics choose names pertinent to their respective religions when they are initiated/confirmed, and Jewish and Hindu children are named in special ceremonies shortly after their births^{4, 5}.

Names can also be used to convey ownership. It is common in Western cultural tradition for a woman to adopt her husband's last name which may or may not have begun as a sign of a husband's ownership of his wife. More importantly, children have historically been given their father's last name, originally to prove paternity⁶ In France, America, and ancient Rome, slaves were named by their owners and freed slaves or their descendants often changed their names to express their freedom⁷.

In one apocryphal Jewish tale, Adam's first wife, Lilith, escaped her servitude to Adam in the garden of Eden by speaking the four-letter name of G-d⁸. Blogger (and 5-time baby namer) Swistle even has a separate blog solely to discuss baby name choices! Clearly, names are a huge undertaking - even twitter and facebook think so! Carrie Anne couldn't fit her process into twitter's 140 character limit (neither could I).

 Mary used family names with special meaning,

and Sarah plans to follow her family's tradition and do so as well.

Amber wanted her children's names to sound good and be gender-appropriate.

Some people balk at naming their kids after people they know unless those people are meaningful to them. My friend Ei, however, just recognized good names when she heard them.

Literary names are a common theme for kids and pets alike. My husband's cousin, Kara, considered her baby's birth mother and her own (literary-based) name preferences when naming her daughter. His grandmother named her first daughter after a character in Les Miserables, Quentin's piano teacher named her cats after Harry Potter characters, and my friend John wants a puppy named Valentine (Ender's Game). Other facebook friends have used music (Luke's aunt named her chihuahuas "Sonny and Cher"), television, and even the alphabet ("but it's too long," says Uncle Bob) as inspiration for their children's and pets' names.

Some people prefer to use their child's birth or their own life as inspiration for their children's names. Elizabeth of Making it Fun named her premature first daughter Zoe, which means "life", hoping it would give her some extra spunk. Felicia of A Work in Process gave her son a middle name to symbolize her life's resurrection, and "used up" bad names on her dogs.

Even here in the blogging world, names are sacred - many bloggers give their children "blog names," nicknames or made-up names to conceal their children's identities and protect their privacy. Tanis from Attack of the Redneck Mommy and Jennifer from Playgroups Are No Place for Children each gave their children nicknames for their blogs. Tanis admits her choices were "the first things that popped into my head; not inspired by anything," and Jennifer's weren't particularly special. In fact, she eventually switched to "made-up" names instead of nicknames for her kids, blog-christening them with the unused names from her pregnancy short-list.


As for Luke and I, we are very methodical name-choosers. First, I pick up every baby name book I can find and scour the Internet. Then Luke and I try to find a comprehensive baby name book, and each of us go through it with a highlighter (I get one color, he gets the other). And that's just for our pets. We named our first cat Mallory because she would climb anything she could see (in retrospect, that would have been a good name for Jude!). Back to naming kids; if we have strong feelings about a name, we make a note of that in the book. When we're finished with the book, I make a spreadsheet, including columns for names, meanings, origins, each of our personal feelings on the name and, importantly, how the name is trending according to the SSA. We're pretty adamant about choosing unusual names, so anything in the top 100 is basically discounted from the get-go. Then we hem and haw and think and think and think.

The funny thing is, in the end, neither of our children's names were on our mutual "OMG we love that name" list. In fact, Jude isn't on that spreadsheet at all! And meaning ended up as a fairly unimportant consideration. Quentin is certainly not the fifth child, and while we are certainly thankful for Jude⁹, that meaning was not our prime consideration. Amusingly, despite neither of us being Christian (and in fact, I think the guy gets a worse rap than he deserves), we decided against "Judas" in large part because of the negative association with Judas Iscariot. We are fans of Quentin Tarantino, but neither was he our primary consideration for the name of our eldest; however, Hey Jude was a deciding factor in our naming of our second son (and Julia had prime consideration as a girl's name for a similar reason).

As into names as I am, of course our children have middle names. Quentin's follows Luke's family tradition - his middle name is Luke's middle name, Luke's dad's middle name, Luke's paternal grandfather's middle name, Luke's paternal great-grandfather's first name. Hopefully if Quentin ever has children, and has a boy, he will continue that tradition. Jude's middle name was one of many names we liked, but which was too trendy to use as a first name. Plus his initials sound like his grandfather's name.

What about you, Constant Reader? Do you love naming your children? Hate it? Is it all pressure or none? How did you decide your children's names? Do you like popular or trendy names, or do you go against the grain? Does meaning matter? What about nicknames and acronyms created by initials? What's your naming process?