The Name Game
As we breach the beginning of the third trimester of Jenny’s pregnancy, our little tyke-to-be is eggplant-sized. Imagine! All her physiological structures are in place, and her main job for the next three months is just to grow, grow, grow.
We can see it happening: Jenny’s belly has really bloomed out this past month. Can it really keep getting bigger??
At this stage, people are beginning to ask whether we’ve picked out a name for our little Eggplant. Truth is, early on we generated a list of nearly a hundred names that one or the other of us liked. We did a round of voting and narrowed down the serious contenders to around 33, but another 41 were pretty close behind. (Imagine two writers trying to choose just one name . . .)
Part of the problem is we have such similar aesthetic tastes. We like similar design, décor, and clothing and have huge areas of overlap in our tastes in art, music, and theatre.
And we like a lot of the same names because they suit our aesthetic. After checking out the Social Security Administration’s data on what names have been most popular in the past few years, we posit there are two kinds of parents: those who make up or borrow new, fashionable names for their kids and those who dig up old chestnuts. In the first camp are parents of Madisons, Aidens, Masons, and Kaylas. In the latter are the parents of Sophias, Elijahs, Hannahs, and Calebs.
For better or for worse, we’re squarely in the old-chestnut camp. A lot of the names we like are musty old monikers, with a distinct dowdiness to them. They’re a bit twee. As we discovered, many of these names are in vogue right now – which stunned us, since we’ve both always been a bit out of step with what was trendy, even anachronistic. Neither of us has ever been what you’d call a lightning rod for the zeitgeist.
But names we like, like Isabella, Olivia, Abigail, and Lily, are all wildly popular these days. Our friend Darla says there are three Olivias in her baby daughter’s child-care class, and three Isabelle/Isabellas. So much for being out of step.
We’ve decided to rule out anything that trendy. Both of us grew up with very common names and recognize the value in having a name that stands out just a little. Jenny remembers one year at her high school when among the fifteen varsity, JV, and frosh cheerleaders, there were five Jennifers/Jennys.
On the other hand, we also know that kids often don’t like standing out too much. So names like Dandelion and Petra are no longer on our list. (However, we’re still smitten with a name we made up, Aubergine, which sounds like it should be the name of a turn-of-the-century, pinafore-bedecked schoolgirl with ringlets but is actually another name for eggplant. Would our little Eggplant ever forgive us for naming her after a fruit, and a nightshade at that?)
Other names we like we’ve ruled out because although they are not fashionable now they were popular very recently. The bloom has somewhat faded off the rose, as it were. Erin and Sabrina are some examples of this. Again, this comes as something as a surprise, probably because there just aren’t a lot of children in our Lives.
In the interest of narrowing down our list, we’ve weeded out names whose nicknames sound too much like the nicknames for more popular names. (We love the old-fashioned name Adeline, for example, but with all the young Addisons and Madisons out there these days, we’d be one of sixty parents shouting “[M]Addie! Time to go home!” at the playground. (These sound like picky details, we know, but we’ve got to shorten that list somehow!)
We also axed one of Jenny’s favorite names, Violet, when we learned that’s what Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck named their little girl two years ago. We thought of the name ourselves, but it would always look like we’d copied a pair of celebrities. Definitely not our style.
That still leaves a lot of names though.
When we describe our naming deliberations to friends, they often want to problem solve for us, offering time-saving solutions (”Oh, just wait till she’s born and see what she looks like.”) or platitudes (”Geez, who cares if a name is popular or if Jen and Ben like it too? You should name her whatever name you like best.”) Such loved ones, though well meaning, miss the point. The name game isn’t only about winning; it’s about playing. We have enjoyed the journey as much as the destination. It’s fun to think about names! We are not burdened by the process; we’re delighted.
We only wish we had more opportunities to use more of the wonderful names we’ve found. Since we don’t plan to have more children, and we’ve already got a full complement of pets, we are pretty sure this means some fiction writing is in order. This thought does not displease us.
November 23rd, 2007 at 8:37 am
Hey, is Jillian Scott Tynes still in the running??
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Have you played with the “meanings” of names as well?
November 25th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
Of course, you could still use Adeline and call her Deli for short! Not bad for the child of a couple of foodies.
Violet does hark back to a day when flowers and gemstones were grist for the mill. Your grandma was a Pearl and Aunt Pat’s mother-in-law is a Ruby; David’s great-grandma was a Viola. Ah, a whole family of colorful possibilities. When Jenny was an infant, there was a small child in our apartment complex whose Indian parents were living in England when she was born. They loved the tulips in Oxford so much that they named their daughter Tulip and were surprised that it wasn’t a common American name. A lot to be said for naming a child after something you love.
I understand about enjoying the playing of the game. In the sixth grade, when I had a crush on one Warren Andrew Hahn, I named twenty-five of our children and wrote their names on the back of the mirror in my bedroom. Now THAT was a big family.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:01 am
Well, there is this thought —- that little eggplant girl is bound to have imaginary playmates that will need names!
November 26th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Well, just to chime in with the great-grandmas on John’s paternal side, there’s Della and Effie Mae.
November 26th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
DO NOT NAME HER HAZEL!
November 28th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Jillian isn’t in our top ten but it is a good name.
So far we’ve explored the meanings of names we already like. But we haven’t started with a meaning or a symbol and then gone looking for a name.
Hazel is well and truly off the list, if for no other reason than Julia Roberts used it for her daughter. Contemporary celebrity-child names are stricken from our list!
November 30th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
I LOVE the name game!! I’m too impatient to wait to know a baby’s gender, but I love waiting to be surprised by the name!
My vote is for naming her Melanzana. =)
January 5th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
[…] adorable that our families have adopted our madeup name “Aubergine” and started using it for our little girl-to-be. But, alas, they grow up so fast! At 33 weeks, […]