The following is a list of common American names you should not use, under any
circumstances (including variations):
Amber
Ashley
Avery. Just plain ugly. Only use it if your kid's going to be a pig farmer.
Bailey (for both boys and girls)
Brandon (for girls)
Brianna
Britney
Brook(e) (both)
Caitlin
Cameron (both)
Cassidy
Chase
Cody (both)
Connor
Dakota (both)
Dylan (both)
Garrett. I just don't like it.
Gavin. It just sounds dumb.
Hadley
Hailey
Hayden
Hunter. C'mon. What are you thinking?
Jade/Jada
Jared
Jasmine
Jenna
Jordan (both)
Kayla
Kaylee
Kaylin
Mikayla
Kelsey (either)
Mason. I shouldn't need to explain.
Parker (either)
Preston
Sebastian. This is for his own protection. Besides, I have it on very good authority that boys named Sebastian are insufferable.
Sierra
Summer
Tanner. You've got to be kidding me.
Taylor
Tiffany
Other things to avoid:
Any name that is usually a last name. Spencer, ferinstance. Or Kennedy. FOR GOD'S SAKE, DON'T NAME YOUR KID KENNEDY.
A name that is traditionally for boys given to a girl (or vice versa)
Inventing your own name. I've only seen it not suck once (Hi, Jothan). On the other hand, you have LaKenya Flatreese.
Names from an ethnicity not your own (unless they have been mainstreamed). Ashanti, for example.
Unique spellings. Do you really want to cause trouble every time your child has to give his/her name over the phone? Do you want people to mispronounce your child's name because you thought an 'H' made sense in the middle of it? This also includes extra useless letters, like in Erick.
Sort of in the above category, but sort of not: substituting 'i' where 'y' is traditional (Kelly becoming Kelli) or 'k' where 'c' is traditional (Caleb becoming Kaleb). Erik is ok.
Any name that sounds like a stripper or porn star name. I've listed the ones I can think of above, but I'm sure there are more.
Names with special meaning, like Destiny. Hope and Grace are exempted from this rule. Faith is not. Angel is not. Do you really want to hear the same joke fifty thousand times when he/she's crying?
Names of movie stars, movie characters, or pop stars. Everyone else had the same idea. Trust me. Look up the history of Trinity at the SSA list below. Note the spike after 1999, when "The Matrix" came out.
Words that are not names. Like Blue or Autumn.
Avoid diminutives. If you want to call her Katie, name her Katherine anyway. It gives her options. Don't name him Joe; give him a whole name: Joseph. Gracie may be cute when she's three, but when she's thirty she'll want to be Grace. Give her the choice.
Mystical names, like Maya
No names ending in Lee
One name, and one name only
Be sure to consult the Social Security Administration's list of popular baby names before making a decision. It's funny to see the plunge Monica took after 1998.
God, reading through the list of top 1000 names for 2002 is depressing. Hayden? Riley? Dakota? Cheyenne? Do I need to add states and state capitals to the forbidden names? What the hell? Tanner? Colton? Sounds like an earth-moving company. TRISTAN?!? Can you imagine a 9-month old baby named TRISTAN? Brayden? GAGE? JALEN?!?!? I'm going to have an aneurysm if I keep reading this list. Kiara? What the hell is that? Are there that many idiot parents out there? Caden? That's #154! And Kaden is #175. Together they'd be #85. 85!!!! Mckenna Delaney Payton!!! Trenton? The capital of NEW JERSEY?!?! Genesis? Kendall Donovan Dawson Riley Harrison Cooper! A whole page of terrible names. I'm stopping here because I'm going to kill myself if I don't.
My sister thought it would be funny to make me choke on my own vomit, so she sent me a compilation of naming suggestions that people have made. Here you go. Has to be read to be believed, but I don't doubt people really made those suggestions.
In Williamson County, just north of Austin's Travis County, we have running for public office:
Tom Pilgrim
Wes Riddle
Jana Duty
Rick Faught
And those are just the ones with prominent signs posted along the way to Sun City. In 2002, there was a House candidate named John Courage. Where do people get these names? If nothing else, it tells me that I could never run for public office. Forget the other, more obvious reasons; the name is clearly handicap enough.
We filled out the paperwork to officially name her Uma Davey Gangatirkar. We had various Western names that we liked, but there was something a little... remote about them; we didn't really feel it. Davey, obviously, has a real connection and real significance. You may hear it pronounced "Devi" by Indian people (there's a difference in the D). In at least a couple of Indian languages, "devi" means goddess. So that's nice, too, but I don't want to diminish its significance as Jessica's name.
We spent a lot of time looking at names. We rejected lots of them. Uma won because it has a lot of nice qualities, besides being agreeable to us both:
It's relatively known, thanks to Uma Thurman, but not at all common.
It's Indian, so it reflects her real (as opposed to imagined, like with Celtic names) heritage.
It's short and really, really easy to say, which goes a little way to balance out the Gangatirkar at the end, and should shield her from the trauma I suffered growing up.
She'll be able to say her own name at an early age because it's short and the sounds are easy for a small child.
43folders. An entity that has numbers
1
in its name I assume to be inferior in some way. 37signals. It just screams "I have no imagination!" Blink 182. It's like when you sign up for some Internet service and the name you want is taken. 3Jane. They suggest "johnsmith831 is still available" as though "johnsmith" wasn't 831 times better. Prefuse73. I don't care. Da5id. You might be awesome, but if you can't come up with a name that doesn't have numbers and isn't actually the nth version, try a different name. Interface21.
While waiting at the dentist, I read part of a "Parenting" magazine
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. There are some interesting and useful pieces of information in there, but mainly I read them out of a voyeuristic desire to see what terrible names parents give their children. There were a few finds here, though nothing fantastic. There were the siblings Kaleb and Adeline. Also, twins Sid and Newt (apparently not short for anything). My favorite was the family with four kids: Brayden, Caysen, Tayler, and Camden. I tell you, parents these days...
Big Faceless Organization produces software for businesses. That's their real name. I did a little bit of research to make sure it wasn't a joke; it seems like a real thing.
I've noticed that luxury car models tend to have names that are more like part numbers than words. It's not a perfect correlation, but it's pretty reliable. Non-luxury cars tend to have words as their names. Luxury cars may use words such as "Turbo" as modifiers on the base model name, or non-luxury cars may have alphanumeric codes like 2500HD in the same role, but the base model names tend to follow the pattern. Note the luxury cars (exceptions highlighted; it looks like there are more exceptions than there really are because the names much longer):
Ford: Crown Victoria, Edge, Escape, Escape Hybrid, E-Series Van, E-Series Wagon, Expedition, Explorer, Explorer Sport Trac, F-150, F-250 Super Duty, F-350 Super Duty, F-450 Super Duty, Five Hundred, Focus, Focus Wagon, Freestar, Freestyle, Fusion, Mustang, Ranger, Shelby GT500, Taurus, Taurus X
GMC: Acadia, Canyon, Envoy, Savana, Savana Cargo Van, Sierra 1500, Sierra 2500HD, Sierra 3500HD, Sierra Classic 1500, Sierra Classic 2500HD, Sierra Classic 3500, Sierra Hybrid, Yukon, Yukon Denali, Yukon XL
Hyundai should have followed Honda, Nissan, and Toyota's lead(s) and created a new nameplate for its new luxury sedan, the Genesis. Hyundais have come a long way, but I don't think quite enough. They should have gone with something that dripped class, like Leganza. Or maybe just use Genesis for the marque. Then they should have given the car itself a cryptic alphanumeric name. Of the "cool" letters, 'K' and 'N' are the only ones that are still unused. 'K' is superior to 'N' not just because I think so, but because of where Hyundai is from. 'K' by itself is a non-starter because of the ill-fated Chrysler K-class from the 1980s. 'N' by itself would be confusing in use; "I just bought an N!" As a South Korean company, they certainly can't do NK, and KN risks sounding like cane. 'K' plus one number would sound too much like Audi's 'A' plus one number scheme. '300' and '500' are out because of Ford and Chrysler respectively. It's got a V8, but 'K' followed by '8' is hard to say: kay ate. That strikes 'K8,' 'K80,' and 'K800' from the list. Letters after numbers imply a trim rather than a model, so something like 'N8K' is out. It can't be 'N8' because then people would call it "nate." 'N80?' I guess that's the best I can do.
The Lexus brand was introduced by Toyota in 1989. According to the Social Security Administration, the name Alexis was the 92nd most popular name in the country that year. Since then, it ascended to #3 in 1999 before falling back down to #14 in 2006. All of the Alex* names have seen similar spikes over the last 20 years, which you can see with the handy Name Voyager. Coincidence? I think not.
In software, there are two processes for making software support different languages. One is "internationalization," which is where you make the software look up the various phrases and words from external sources (dictionary files, etc.) rather than having them embedded in the source code. That makes the software merely capable of supporting other languages. The other is "localization," where you actually produce the files with the text for Swiss German or whatever and package a version of the software containing them. Some people decided that the words "internationalization" and "localization" were too long. Rather than abbreviate them the way normal people would, they abbreviated them as "i18n" and "l10n," meaning "'i' then 18 letters then 'n'" and "'l' then 10 letters then 'n'" respectively. I figure I can follow that model and abbreviate my name as "k3n g9r" (and put it on my license plate?), pronounced "Ken Gee-Niner." Kieran would be "k4n," and Uma would of course be "u1a."
