Miss Manners Revisits Unusual Names
Thursday, November 06, 2025
Occasionally, parents-to-be -- in love with the sound of a word (you'd be surprised), or even something they made up -- will throw caution to the winds and saddle their offspring with a lifetime of awkwardness and corrections upon naming their child.
This very subject came up again for Judith Martin recently, but in the form of a reader suggestion from someone this happened to well before it became fashionable:
The way I've managed it is: I only correct the pronunciation if I expect to see that person again. This way, I'm not constantly feeling rude by correcting everyone. And the next time I see that particular person, they may not remember exactly how to say my name, but they do know there's something odd there -- so they ask.This is a great suggestion, which Martin appreciates, even as she reminds other readers to spare a thought for their child at naming time.
Martin's mention of also attempt[ing] to avoid what turns out to be the fad name of the year reminds me again of my wife's solution, which she calls the keychain rule. This comes as closely as possible to avoiding both a lifetime of corrections and being one of six kids with the same name in a classroom.
I can partially vouch for this advice. I was named for my father, and so ended up using a shortened version of my middle name instead of my first day-to-day. This means that in any setting in which a person first encounters my name in written form, that's what they'll call me. A little bit like the letter-writer above, I let it go unless I'll have relatively frequent future contact with the person, such as a working or social relationship.
| At least, with my day-to-day name, I got my version of the Michael Bolton problem over with, in grade school. |
In my case, it's not that I feel like I'll look rude so much as it is that the correction is tiresome, and has sometimes caused paperwork problems. A surprising number of people will imagine that I'm telling them they got my first name wrong, and "correct" it for me. (It probably doesn't help that my first and middle names suggest different ethicities, with the middle being a better visual fit.) I just avoid the minor immediate and possible long-term hassles altogether now.
-- CAV
6 comments:
My concern with unusual names is the intersection between cultural diversity and facilitating one's child's future.
Naming conventions are culturally dependent. What we consider "normal" names is a factor of what culture we live in. A European culture is going to have different naming conventions from a native North American culture (Rand even commented on that in "Atlas Shrugged", with the judge's name), and both will have a different naming convention form an Asian culture or an African culture. And the USA is, ideally, a melting pot; the main driving force in our culture is to take the best of other cultures and integrate it into our own. Which includes names. The result should be a variety of naming conventions, as people arrive from other areas. It's the same as food, or clothing, or musical tastes, or the like--variety means that the system is functioning as intended.
The obvious corollary, of course, is that giving your child a joke name merely to get reactions is also stupid. Shock value isn't a justification for a name; it doesn't work. The third time you have to correct little Darth or Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (from Sweden) it'll become normalized.
And let's not pretend that naming conventions are objective. They're like any other part of language, they change over time. Names that were perfectly normal even two generations ago are vanishing completely. When was the last time you met a five-year-old Gertrude? Or Philis? Have you ever met anyone named Woodrow outside of a list of presidents? There used to be a few men named Guy where I grew up, but you never see that name anymore. New names come in to fill the voids, and become the next decade's normal. I'll agree that there will inevitably be a lot of detritus along the way--anyone named after a TV character, for example--but that's the nature of social change. We try everything, some things don't pan out, and we keep the ones that do.
Thoughtful comments, and I agree with them overall.
You've gotten me to consider whether my key chain rule might seem ham-fisted or tone-deaf in the context of America as a melting pot, and I see that it would banish the traditional names of many families (the Guys and the Woodrows to middle-name status if accepted in some iron-clad way.
The rule would indeed have done this with my Dad's name (which I considered using for my son despite him advising me no to use it "for any son you might have" when he was alive).
Offhand, I'd say something like "Use this rule if you want something neither too common nor too unfamiliar to most people" of the rule. And it does change with the times. We saw no Woodrow or Hubert key chains, but did see a few Spanish names that were uncommon when we were younger.
Yo, Gus, similar to Dinwar's point, there's the issue of "black names," which seem to irritate some people to distraction, though there's interesting history to many of them. For example, there are several names used only or especially among blacks that are survivals of West African day names, names given to children born on particular days of the week: Cuba, Cujo, and Cuffy for boys, and in the past (I don't think it's so common anymore) Phoebe for girls (like Afiba, an Akan day name for girls born on Friday). Then there are names like Prince and Queen, which were adopted so that whites who refused to address blacks with "Sir," "Ma'am," and "Mr./Mrs." plus their last name but just used their bare first name would have to show them respect anyway. And then there are Arabic names (Latifa, for example, meaning "gentle" or "kind"), some of which could be centuries old in the US (there was one freed slave in Georgia who signed a document in Arabic in 1810, for example) and others probably associated with the Black Islam movement, and a passel of idiosyncratic names that basically represented a desire to assert the individuality of one's children in a society determined to efface it. Again, some of these have been targets of mockery, but they represent understandable traditions.
Oh, I forgot the most salient example of a mother's name being used as a middle name: H. P. Lovecraft's mother's maiden name was Sarah Susan Phillips.
It's common in my family to use maternal surnames as middle names. One of my brothers did this with a son. The other brother used a middle name for a son that was common in his wife's family, and that I bet was originally a maternal surname.
We also frequently use a name from each maternal grandparent. This is how we honored my father (and his wish): By using my father-in-law's first name and my dad's middle names for our son.
s/from each maternal grandparent/from a grandparent on each side
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