What's in a name, Part I

Names are tough. I'm going to do a few postings about this because there are so many considerations with new things to think about all the time.

Importantly, some traditional considerations have become no longer applicable. For example, you'd think gender would be a primary driver, but no longer. We dig boy names for girls. Elliot, Darcy, Jim. But then there is the reaction of others. My brother in law Matt hates the boy names for girls and likely hates girl names for boys as well but we haven't discussed it. So, we'd forever have in our minds that Uncle Matt disapproves of the name.

Also, there is the American-Australian cultural differences. When we told one of my best friends Mo that we liked the name Angus (a popular name in Australia), he threatened to call the child "meat" for the rest of his life. Not the reaction we're looking for from our multicultural little tike.

You also need to consider the name associations from your life (Jessica will have a horse face and Kevin will have BO). The visceral reactions of cruel school children are particularly important to us as our child will have the double handicap of being both a redhead (which means 18 years of either being carrot top or fire crotch, couldn't really tell you which scarred me more) and a Beatty (for some reason, Master Beatty is quite damaging to a 15 year old). So, we can't saddle the poor child with some names we love. Charlotte would be a harlot for most of high school and Bart would certainly smell like a fart during grade school.

Names are going to be tricky