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I hardly think a fake license plate is the criteria for naming your kid. For some of that stuff, you can order merchandise with your kid's name, even if it is Bathsheba!
My son's name is spelled one way in England and a different way here in the US. We gave him the British spelling because my family's background is British. As he was growing up, we could never find anything pre-printed with his name with the "correct" spelling -- had to go to England to get those things properly spelled!
Similar to my brother, who has a Scottish name. It was constantly mispronounced and misspelled as he was growing up.
Yes, that just makes it awkward in school for children.
I remember in my HS class we had something like 3 Jeffs, 4 Johns, 2 Dans, 4 Sarahs, etc, etc... Just your standard names. If you had a really unique name you had trouble avoiding extra attention.
IE: Who's gonna stick out the most in this class?
Jeff
Jeff
Jeff
John
John
John
John
Alice
Dan
Dan
Sarah
Sarah
Sarah
Sarah
Oliver (#5) and Olivia (#2), (but not Olive) are quite popular in the US right now. And I hasten to point out that "Alice" is not a "quirky" name. Next year, there may be several Alices in the same class. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/
Quote:
Originally Posted by WellShoneMoon
My son's name is spelled one way in England and a different way here in the US. We gave him the British spelling because my family's background is British. As he was growing up, we could never find anything pre-printed with his name with the "correct" spelling -- had to go to England to get those things properly spelled!
Similar to my brother, who has a Scottish name. It was constantly mispronounced and misspelled as he was growing up.
Our daughter has a Swedish name that has several spellings, one of which is way more Swedish than the others. We used the anglicized spelling but many people use the Swedish for her, sometimes even when they know better!
Last edited by Katarina Witt; 12-22-2019 at 12:00 PM..
My Uncle was named Salvatore. Nobody in the family called him that, or even SAL. He was always SALLY to us, and given the nickname Rocky to outside of family.
Adult daughter and I went to Spiritualist Church. One elder said he kept getting the name of a deceased loved one named Sally but was a MALE. My daughter and I just started laughing. Hi, Uncle Sally!
This is interesting. In Jewish families, it's traditional to name a baby only after a deceased relative, never a living relative. That's why you'll almost never find a Jewish "Junior."
I'm told the reason is that when the Angel of Death comes for the old person, you don't want to confuse the Angel and have it take instead the baby with the same name.
My mom was a devout Catholic but she also had a boatload of superstitions that she 'followed' as well. In addition to the garden-variety black cats/walking under ladders/broken mirror stuff, she also firmly believed that having one's bed face the door meant an early death, that gifting anyone something with a point on it would break the friendship, that owning pearls would bring sadness ("pearls are for tears" was how she put it), and that the name of any family member who had died before the age of 80 was a "bad luck name" for a baby. There were a slew of others but I can't remember them all, LOL
I did the genealogy thing re: both my parents ancestry some years ago. There are several 'juniors' (my dad was a III, in fact) and many babies named for relatives both living and dead in my dad's lineage but not one single instance of a person named after a deceased family member in my mom's family. So perhaps the "no dead people" naming thing was passed down to her through generations. My dad's family originally came from England but my mom's family was from Eastern Europe, don't know if that had any bearing on how people named babies though.
Sadly, if you look at your states adoption photo listing, which is essentially a list of children from families that were so dysfunctional, violent, sexually abusive or drug addicted that someone called the state agency to have them removed - you will see a preponderance of these names.
Even when a classic name or a Biblical name is chosen, it is with an odd and "you-neek" spelling.
I went to school with a boy named Cornelius, and his sister was Cornelia. They were born in the Netherlands. He was Neil and she was Cory.
I had a great-aunt Bertha, born in the 1880s. I don't see that one coming back anytime soon. But you never know. I would never in a million years have dreamed that someone would name their baby Hazel again.
I also went to school with a Cornelius... he went by Connie
My mom was a devout Catholic but she also had a boatload of superstitions that she 'followed' as well. In addition to the garden-variety black cats/walking under ladders/broken mirror stuff, she also firmly believed that having one's bed face the door meant an early death, that gifting anyone something with a point on it would break the friendship, that owning pearls would bring sadness ("pearls are for tears" was how she put it), and that the name of any family member who had died before the age of 80 was a "bad luck name" for a baby. There were a slew of others but I can't remember them all, LOL
I did the genealogy thing re: both my parents ancestry some years ago. There are several 'juniors' (my dad was a III, in fact) and many babies named for relatives both living and dead in my dad's lineage but not one single instance of a person named after a deceased family member in my mom's family. So perhaps the "no dead people" naming thing was passed down to her through generations. My dad's family originally came from England but my mom's family was from Eastern Europe, don't know if that had any bearing on how people named babies though.
Well yes, different cultures have different naming traditions. It was common in German and Swedish cultures to call a child by their middle name, e.g. John Harry might be Harry, Maria Dorothea might be Dorothy, etc. Those are some real names from my Dad's German family. My Swedish ancestry son-in-law says they did the same thing.
Oliver (#5) and Olivia (#2), (but not Olive) are quite popular in the US right now. And I hasten to point out that "Alice" is not a "quirky" name. Next year, there may be several Alices in the same class. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/
No it's not, it was just the first one I could think of that wasn't common for my classmates.
It was the adults that had that name when I was in school. A few of the school staff and teachers were named Alice. lol
This is interesting. In Jewish families, it's traditional to name a baby only after a deceased relative, never a living relative. That's why you'll almost never find a Jewish "Junior."
I'm told the reason is that when the Angel of Death comes for the old person, you don't want to confuse the Angel and have it take instead the baby with the same name.
There was a similar naming convention with my Dutch forebearers. If a child died, the next baby was named for the dead child, with alterations for gender. So, my grandmother's sister who died at the age of six was Maria, and I had a great-uncle Marinus. It also worked with parents and babies. My grandmother's mother died in the eighth month of her eighth pregnancy, and my mother was born the next year and is named for her.
Interestingly, I once saw a documentary on Vincent Van Gogh. His parents had an earlier Vincent who had died when he was three. Van Gogh's father was a Dutch Reformed minister, a very dark, death/sin/hell-focused form of Christianity, and every Sunday after church, the family would go out to the cemetery and visit and pray and the first little Vincent's grave. So, the artist grew up seeing his name on a headstone. Made me wonder if that contributed to his mental illness, or at least fortified it.
Well yes, different cultures have different naming traditions. It was common in German and Swedish cultures to call a child by their middle name, e.g. John Harry might be Harry, Maria Dorothea might be Dorothy, etc. Those are some real names from my Dad's German family. My Swedish ancestry son-in-law says they did the same thing.
Yup. Same with the Dutch, although it wasn't always that clear. My grandmother was Anna Petranella, but they called her Nellie. However, she had a younger sister who was my great-aunt Anna. I asked my father if my grandmother's real name was Anna, how could she have a sister named Anna? Well, Aunt Anna's real name was Henrietta. Never quite figured that one out.
Thankfully, I don't see many little girls being named either Petranella or Henrietta these days.
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