Baby Names
Posted by Nathaniel.
Kirsten and I have been working on a name, and it’s really really hard. We have a good name, but is it the perfect name? Should a name even be perfect?
Anyway, a few weeks ago on http://www.overheardinnewyork.com there was a great story:
Woman 1: I’m so tired of everyone calling my daughter by the wrong name!
Woman 2: What are they calling her?
Woman 1: Everyone calls her “Lady Nasty”.
Woman 2: What’s her real name?
Woman 1: Her name is La’Dynasty.
So now we’re thinking something along those lines.
May 20th, 2008 at 12:09 pm Using
Heh, that’s fantastic. So you’re thinking about something like Fa’Tass?
But seriously, parents need to be a little less dumb about naming their kids. No had nicknames, no embarrassing initial combinations, etc. And no intentional mispellings that make for uncertain pronunciation. Example #1: Angels outfielder Chone Figgins. Pronounced “shawn”. bleh.
I mean, unless you and K have already picked out Chone for your kid, in which case it’s inventive and clever, nice work!
May 20th, 2008 at 2:03 pm Using
My name in Chinese has very similar pronunciation to “apron”, so quite some people just called me apron @_@. Luckily apron itself is not a really interesting or funny word, so it was not too bad. I had one classmate, who is male, and his name has exactly the same pronunciation as the word for “erectile dysfunction” in Chinese…. Later on before college, he changed his name.
Actually I’ve been thinking about names as well, not for my kid who is still hiding somewhere, but for myself. My Chinese name is quite hard to pronounce and doesn’t really have a counterpart in English at all. In some way I think it’s probably not fair for people who don’t speak Chinese. Many of my chinese friends have English names, but somehow I just feel kind of weird. But still, seeing people struggle to say my name is fun, but not that fun… How’s Gavin? A good or bad name?
May 20th, 2008 at 4:21 pm Using
I don’t think you should try to find an English name Qun. It really strikes me as a way to hold true to your heritage. You’re not from an English-speaking country so there’s really no reason to have an English name. If you’ll give me a second to rant, I also think that we should generally refer to places the way the native speakers refer to them. One example would be Myanmar/Burma (although that’s a more complex situation and I sadly don’t have a different example). Perhaps a good example is Kiev vs. Kyiv.
When I think of “Gavin”, I either think of the band “Bush” or the evil Korean lawyer on “Angel.”
May 20th, 2008 at 5:44 pm Using
I’ve been told by some of the Chinese students in my group that I do a decent job (for a non-native, untrained speaker) of pronouncing Chinese names, so I hope I’ve gotten yours mostly right, Qun. If not, I’d cheerfully welcome your correction next time. All I know is what Weiwei and Feng told me, and that it’s supposed to sound more like “Chioon” than “Chunn”, although not exactly.
Anyways, I’m pretty good at mimicry of what I’ve heard, so that probably explains why I’m not bad with less common names once I’ve heard them spoken properly.
As for responsible naming practices, I think Michael hit that one right on the head. I’m very happy to have made it through a Deep South youth without ever picking up colloquial nicknames (e.g., “Bubba”) or the nickname “TJ”, in spite of my first two initials. Many of the men on my dad’s side of the family had the first name of “Russell” - so many that nicknaming conventions were adopted to distinguish between them. My dad uses Rusty, but the earlier generations included a “Buck” (my grandfather), a “Dumpy”, a “Sonny”, and a “Kip”, among others…
So yeah, good names are important. Beware the Old Testament: “Abednego” hasn’t been popular for at least two millennia. Also potential problems arise when using the Greek and Roman classics: “Oedipus” carries lots of baggage, and the once-mighty “Ajax” has become a multi-surface cleaning powder.
And don’t even get me started on the poor kids whose poorly-adjusted parents decided to look towardstheir favorite obsession for inspiration. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all kinds of geeky myself, but naming your kid after characters from Star Trek, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, or whatever is just not altogether wise. Middle names, maybe, if they’re not too weird. (Chewbacca doesn’t work, no matter how hard you try.) And Heaven help those kids stuck with any kind of name pulled from anything written by Robert Jordan.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:37 am Using
Speaking of names, this is an interesting post:
http://www.badbabynames.net/2008/02/26/hey-bud/
The guy went through old census records to find odd names. The family in this post apparently wasn’t too creative and named their kids Bud, Little Bud, Buddy, Little Buddy, Babe, and Least Buddy.
I had some good baby names that Kirsten shot down including Zenith (it’s a good sentiment, straight up, even if it is the name of a TV brand), Danger (as a middle name, I think I’m going to save that for a boy so his girlfriend can ask “Mother, may I sleep with Danger?” like a lifetime movie.). I also really liked the idea of a classical Greek middle name like Elecktra. Then there were some other names like Sabine, Chloe, Gisele, and a few others that are extremely pretty names. I’m just not sure that we’re really French/Belgian/European enough to use them.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:42 am Using
One other little thing that I’ve picked up in my name search. It used to be the complete domain of the man to pick the baby’s name. Probably because, in the old days, the mom would be completely doped out on morphine when it came time to sign the birth certificate. That’s where a lot of really bad names came from.
Or, in my extended family, where names got changed… Kirsten’s family had a history of using family names for the eldest son switching from Roland to Leonard every other generation. However, a handful of generations ago the dad was too drunk to remember the right name and Roland got switched to Ronald.
We’re not doing family names.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:46 pm Using
Nathaniel, I have the same feeling as well that my name is just a part of me. This feeling actually got much stronger after I came to US, and this is the reason I haven’t been using an English name. But still the name thing is kind of annoying, sometimes I’m not completely sure all of these confusions are necessary. After all, in some sense it’s not fair or practical to require an English speaker to know how to pronounce my name correctly, especially when the way we choose to write down the name in English is just confusing, who knows “Q” actually refers to that weird sound…. I think this is also one reason that it’s almost impossible to refer to places etc. the way natives do, since it’s just too difficult to use one language system to indicate the pronunciation of a completely different language system. Like my name, English just doesn’t have that pronunciation at all. Tim, you did a great job pronouncing my name, and you are very right that it’s more like Chioon than Chun (which btw is another character in chinese), but even chi is still not quite right. Basically it’s just impossible to use english letters to explain the pronunciation of Q….
Talking about the names in extended family, we used to follow a rule, at least in some part of china and usually only for males, that the same generation would all have one character in common in their names. For example, my father and his two brothers, and all his male cousins from his father’s side, all have two characters as the name the second of which is the same one. It’s kind of a nice way to tell quickly whether someone is your uncle or cousin or nephew since it could be quite confusing for big families, my mother’s youngest aunt is one year younger for example.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:58 am Using
I don’t know, my thought is that your name isn’t English, why should English-speaking people assume that the pronunciation should follow something from English. Same thing with place names. Yes, it requires more work on the English-speaker’s part, but they can suck it up. Haha, and don’t get my started on how people on the East Coast pronounce Oregon. That’s even a state in our own country.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:50 pm Using
Oh, come on. You can’t leave me hanging on how we east-coasters pronounce “Oregon” wrong. How do west-coasters pronounce it then? I tend to pronounce it in the letter-swallowing way my “people” pronounce everything. Oregon to me is “OR-ih-g’n” (with that “ih” just barely audible) and I’ve noticed, from repetition, that Maryland has now become “MAIR-lin” for me.
May 28th, 2008 at 10:54 pm Using
it’s orrey-gun by my pronunciation.
May 28th, 2008 at 11:03 pm Using
Holly, you’re just fine with your OR pronunciation - the mistake is to say “ore-ee-gon” as though you are talking about a “ore-ee” sided shape (i.e. like the last syllable of ‘polygon’).