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.