Nerding Over Girl Names, No. 100: Scholastica

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A few of the names on my list are unusable in real life, but then this is just a list of female names I like; there's no human child on the way. 

"Scholastica" would indeed be a lot to hang on a child. It would come with heavy expectations, more so than even a virtue name. And yet a famous saint wore the name memorably enough that it comes down to us today, nearly 1,500 years after her death. St. Scholastica was an abbess and the sister of St. Benedict. He founded the Benedictine Order; she founded the Benedictine nuns. 

The name needs no etymological parsing; it is what it looks like. It suggests scholarly pursuits and achievements, and indeed Scholastica is the patron of education and books. 

Few people throughout history seem to have borne the name. One website, whose claims are not easily verified, alleges that the name peaked in popularity in 1914, with a grand total of five babies given the name that year. 

Sure, if you want to give your girl a scholarly air, you can always give her a name like, say, Irene or Helen or Cordelia -- names that prompt someone to say "I'll bet she has a bookshelf" without the expectations that come with Scholastica. But still, can you imagine a precocious little Scholastica Jones showing up for her first day at school? She sounds like she'd be the main character in a novel that's both gripping and fun, and she's the kind of girl I would have loved to know in school. 

Name-Nerding, Fifteen Years Later

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Fifteen years ago, I was fussing over the perfect name for our daughter. I talked about the process at the time in a Facebook post, and I recently got an itch to see if my naming preferences had changed since then. 

I'm a failed fiction writer, you see, and over the years I've accumulated a number of characters who've taken up permanent residence in my head. One exists as an online persona, another is just hanging around waiting for her story to be told, two others enjoy engaging in online roleplay, and yet another is something like a tulpa but resists specific labeling -- and gets angry if I call her fictional. The thing they have in common is that they're all female. And they all have names I'm rather fond of. Some of those names were rolling around in my head when I was coming up with girl names fifteen years ago, and some weren't.

I work with words, and names are words, and they all have meanings and origins. A name is the first gift you give a child, aside from the gift of life itself, and I believe that a child deserves a name that he or she can wear proudly throughout life. Thus, I put a lot of thought into our kiddo's name. She ended up being Miranda Penelope. Nice cadence. Long names to counterbalance our one-syllable family name. Both with literary origins -- Miranda from Shakespeare; Penelope from Homer. Miranda has a nice meaning, derived by the Bard from the Latin mirandus, meaning "worthy of admiration." Penelope at least doesn't have a bad meaning -- it probably refers either to Penelope's weaving or to some kind of seabird. I was able to live with that.

Still, it was a bit of a compromise name. My wife and I both agreed on Penelope as a middle, but Miranda wasn't my top choice for a first name. I preferred Gretchen, Beatrix, and Saoirse. My wife hated Gretchen, so that was immediately out. Beatrix was a strong contender, but the potential for the nickname Trixie to surface also rankled my wife. And my wife's mom couldn't pronounce Saoirse (SEAR-shah) to save her life. 

I've since cooled on Irish Gaelic names like Saoirse, Fionnuala, and Siobhan. As much as I like exotic and unusual names, I wouldn't want to saddle a kid with a name she constantly had to spell and pronounce for people. 

But Gretchen and Beatrix still rank among my favorites. I still like names with quirky, vintage charm, names that convey timeless elegance, names that sound intellectual, names of Nordic, Slavic, and Germanic origin with heavy consonant clusters. Names that would feel at home on an author, a judge, a professor, a philosopher, an artist. Nothing sugary. Nothing trendy. Nothing trashy. Nothing that condemns a girl to feeling like a perpetual 3-year-old. 

Here was my list from fifteen years ago, in alphabetical order.

Aimee
Alexandria
Alice
Angelica
Annika
Athena
Beatrix
Calista
Carys
Charissa
Cherie
Delaney
Eireann
Elswyth
Fae
Fionnuala
Frieda
Greta
Heidi
Heather
Helen
Irene
Iris
Kerensa
Larissa
Lotus
Lydia
Lyra
Marina
Martha
Mei
Melissa
Miranda
Natalie
Penelope
Sabine
Santi
Saoirse
Selena
Serena
Shirin
Sunniva
Susan
Tabitha
Theresa
Vanessa
Veronica
Victoria
Wendy
Zoe

Of those fifty names, seventeen made it to my revised list of 100 favorite girl names, one with a slightly altered spelling. Some of the names from this original list I'm indifferent to now. Others leave me wondering what I was thinking. I note that Gretchen didn't even make my list back then: I must have reasoned there was no point in including it, since it was a no-go for one of the two parents.

But now there are no more kids on the way, only fictional characters in my head. And they're going to want names when they show up. So I suppose I'll consider my new list as a sort of fantasy lineup of female names. I'll dedicate a post to each one, counting down from 100 to 1. Maybe somebody reading will take a liking to a name, in which case, you're welcome. But this is mainly for my own amusement, as pretty much everything on this blog is. 

Stay tuned.

The Classics and the Thrill of Discovery

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In a tumultuous year in my life, I've found something to anchor me that has done the trick for many a year: music. 

I started out 2026 with an ambitious goal of broadening my knowledge of classical music. I've had an appreciation for classical ever since I was a kid, but I never ventured too far away from the mainstream. Beethoven's symphonies, Bach's D-minor Toccata and Fugue, Bolero, Carmina Burana... the stuff most people know. I'd dipped my toes into Bartók mainly because King Crimson's Robert Fripp had cited him as an influence. Likewise, I knew of Stravinsky from Yes. I picked up some Copland, Mussorgsky, and Ginastera from Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, and later The Planets from the Eighties one-off Emerson, Lake, & Powell. Somehow I'd also found my way to Shostakovich. But that was pretty much it. 

So I decided this year to binge-listen to as many symphonies as I could, from as many composers as I could. My goal was to work through the big names whose works made up the standard repertoire and branch out from there. 

Well, thanks to helpful discussions with Claude and lots of distractions from YouTube's algorithm, I quickly discovered more composers and compositions than I could keep up with. I did my best to balance the big names with the intriguing side discoveries, and more often than not, the side discoveries won out -- not because of any desire to be contrary, which, admittedly, is often a driving factor for me, but just because I realized how many unappreciated hidden gems there were in the classical world. 

Essentially, what happens in classical is the same as what happens everywhere else: The gatekeepers coalesce around a few big names and curate the pieces they decide are worthy of attention. If your local classic-rock station says it's going to play some Kansas, you know you're going to hear one of three titles from the band's vast catalog: "Dust in the Wind," "Carry On Wayward Son," or "Point of Know Return," as if those are the only songs Kansas ever made. Likewise, the people who set the programs for your local orchestras are going to pack their seasons with musical selections guaranteed to put butts in the seats. Who's going to take a gamble on, say, Anton Rubinstein when Beethoven's Fifth or the music of Star Wars is a sure ticket-seller? 

So if you want to discover anything beyond the mainstream, you have to put in the hard work to find it. The good news is, we do have useful algorithms that pick up on the pieces you spend time with, and helpful AI bots that can direct you toward artists that may resonate with you based on common threads among the things you're liking and disliking. (Just be mindful of AI hallucinations. Claude and GPT have more than once sent me looking for things that don't actually exist.) 

A good example: One of my favorite discoveries this year has been Ralph Vaughan Williams. If you've heard the name, chances are you think of Vaughan Williams as that English guy who wrote some light, and ultimately inconsequential, pastoral music. "The Lark Ascending" is his "Dust in the Wind": It's a pretty violin piece that regularly ranks among Britain's most beloved musical works. And yet it barely scratches the surface of who Vaughan Williams was as a composer. His chamber works are deeply melodic and satisfying. His piano concerto is one of a kind, and fiendishly complex. And his sixth symphony pummels you one moment and leaves you awash in desolation the next. But it's the kind of material you'd never find if you only ever touched on his "greatest hits." Digging deep quite often yields incredible treasures.

So maybe I'll spend some time using this space to record my thoughts as my musical discoveries continue to unfold. Maybe it'll encourage someone else to dig and discover.  

The thing to remember, which is true for any artform you delve into, is that you don't need anyone's permission to like or dislike anything at all. If you happen to like a composer or a piece no one ever talks about, you don't need to justify your choice to anyone. Likewise, if you don't care for a piece that everyone else says you're supposed to like, you're not necessarily doing things wrong. Your tastes are your own. Case in point: I don't particularly care for Mozart. I respect his genius and understand why he's considered one of the greats. His music just doesn't ring my bell. And I'm not about to apologize for it. 

I've found that I don't care much for Mahler or Bruckner either. 

But the likes have far outweighed the dislikes, and I find new avenues to explore all the time. There's more music out there than I'll ever be able to listen to in my lifetime, and that's actually kind of a fun thought. What will find its way to my ears before my number's up? And what of those artists and pieces that I discover will find a place in my heart? 

I treat every new piece like it's a blind box on a store shelf. I might adore what's inside, or I might not. But the thrill is in the discovery.