<p>I work with a woman whose middle name is Marie and her three daughters are all xxxMarie.</p>
<p>My middle name is Lynn which always seemed so generic to me. Maybe because half the girls in my school class had the same middle name. It’s like our 1960’s mothers couldn’t think of a good middle name so Lynn was the fallback!</p>
<p>Timmy/Tammy and Tom/Tony and Mary/Martha and Mark/Mike and Ike and the like (sorry) are so often used in twin names. Identical first intials, which then gives the kids the same initials…as the parent of identical twins, would make me even nutsier than I am trying to keep things organized and everybody straight. </p>
<p>However, lafalum, I don’t know other cultures, but us Scottish folks come from a tradition of naming the first born grandson after the grandfather. Not sure if this is still done or not, but my brother was named in this way, and has been a nice tie to the past for him. None of that irritating 2 similar names in the same house. But…my dad remarried a woman with a son the same name as my brother, later adopted him, so I have two brothers with the same name, both first and last. They were identified as big and little when younger, but now as adults, is a bit harder to figure an easily identifiable moniker.</p>
<p>I hate my first name. My first name is VERY common for characters in movies…often even virile leading men. But it’s excruciatingly rare in real life. When I met my wife in Europe, she thought it was a good common American name, because so many movie characters have it. She was a bit stunned when she came to the US and found that it was very rare, and was often the name of the most idiotic men in TV commercials. Can anybody guess it? It’s in the title of lots of movies.</p>
<p>Kelsmom–I PM’d you. But yeah, female–I thought I’d dispelled the Garland is a guy myth, dang!</p>
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Seldom am I too clever. </p>
<p>Cue-ar-es-te?</p>
<p>A medical student we knew who worked in a very poor neighborhood came home shaking his head one day. A very pregnant woman, who had spent the previous hour in the waiting room reading pamphlets, told him she just picked out names for her twins: “Saphyllis. Ganorea” and what did he think? I wonder if she was teasing him, will never know.</p>
<p>That reminds me of my mom’s favorite story from her nurse’s training days in Detroit. My mom swears they treated a child named Urethra!</p>
<p>I don’t mind my name, but it’s short and choppy. If I could choose a new one, I’d pick one with more than one syllable. Unfortunately, my short choppy first name rhymes with my short choppy last (married) name, and honestly, it sounds sort of stupid. </p>
<p>And BTW I’m still trying to figure out tourguide’s name!</p>
<p>Urethra?</p>
<p>One of my favorites: we know of an older lady whose real name is Precious Love. I think it’s actually sort of sweet.</p>
<p>tourguide, Wayne ? Monty? Rocky?!</p>
<p>Like the Puritans, we could name children after our highest ideals. Instead of “Faith” “Hope” and “Charity” our kids would be: “Inclusive” for leftwingers, and “Heteronormative” for rightwingers.</p>
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<p>It’s a reliable party trick. Give me a woman’s middle initial and I’ll tell you the middle name. A HUGE part of the time A = Ann(e), M = Marie, L = Lynn(e), and R = Renee.</p>
<p>WashDad: I’ll see you Renee and raise you Rose. It seems to have become a very popular middle name. My middle name is my mother’s maiden name, but it is also a first name. Yup. I got two of them.</p>
<p>My ex-husband’s parents also had last names that were first names: Lee and Wallace. Had we ever had children I just could have strung the names in any order. Our college housemate’s last name was Randall. We made up a very elegant name: Randall (my name) Wallace and had magazine subscriptions sent this way. This gentleman began to take on a life of his own.</p>
<p>I love <em>everything</em> about names—had a field day with six babes! :)</p>
<p>I spent a total of 54+ months poring over baby name books–even took the books to dinner with us when we went out! For years afterward, I’d find scribbled names in my checkbook and on scraps of paper all over the house, the names carefully calligraphed in both my unusual printing and in my flowing cursive. The names had to pass <em>all</em> tests, both visually and auditorily!</p>
<p>Regarding my own name: As with audio’s wife, I have common American first and middle names that my parents chose to offset my dad’s last name, which was VERY ethnic, hard to spell, and even harder for most people to pronounce properly. </p>
<p>My name of choice would be Blythe Sumner. In fact that <em>WAS</em> my name when I met my dh! <em>rofl</em> I met him at a one-time event, and though he was <em>very</em> interested in me, I didn’t have the same interest in return. Thinking that I would never see him again, I gave him the name Blythe Sumner when he asked. Try ‘splainin’ THAT when you DO decide to get together subsequently! :eek:</p>
<p>Oddly enough, one of the reasons I decided to give him that name was because I <em>thought</em> he had done the same to me <em>rofl</em>. My dh has a <em>very</em> handsome and sexy name, and even now, when solicitors call, they laugh and say that his name sounds like a movie star’s. The first thing I asked him when we talked on the phone the first time was if his name was his true given one! (It was.) :)</p>
<p>To this day, I tease my hubster and say that the <em>ONLY</em> reason I caved and went out with him was because of his great name. And I’m only half kidding. I have to confess that the name <em>DID</em> intrigue me greatly and were it not for that, I’m not sure I’d ever have made that first date!</p>
<p>So, yeah, Blythe Sumner would be my choice, although now, I’ve become very accustomed to “berurah” which is my given Hebrew name, so that would also do. My kids even bought me a pretty bracelet with “berurah” spelled out on it! I did try to convince dh to call one of our D’s Blythe, but it was a no go… <em>lol</em></p>
<p>~berurah</p>
<p>Luna Lovegood is a cute name. ;)</p>
<p>H’s father named his four kids names beginning with the same initial, and all of them (including H) have kept the first letter for their kids. There are now five cousins in four countries, and to make it worse, the three boys (including my S) all have the same name, although in Anglo/French/Hungarian versions. Sheesh.</p>
<p>I love names too, and I’m one of those people who has the most common name of the year she was born. I’ve always hated it, from kindergarten when there were four of us, to now when people immediately know I’m 50. I’ve wanted to be named Diana since I was about ten. Don’t think I could carry it off, though.</p>
<p>I wanted to name S something really cool like Geoffrey or Aidan. H picked S’s very boring first name (again, four of them in every class) but I added his two middle names. He recently abandoned the first of them and started using the second, leading to much confusion on standardized tests, etc. I just spent some time with the nice people at the AP office explaining that he is not, in actuality, two people…although he certainly eats like he is.</p>
<p>Great thread!</p>
<p>Like many people on this thread, I picked recognizeable but not often used names for my first two kids. My daughter loves her classic name, my oldest son only uses his nick name and dislikes his real name. I don’t know what I was thinking with my youngest. I knew it was a popular name but I just liked it so much that I talked my husband into it.</p>
<p>In my high school German language class we were allowed to pick new names, either our own in German or a completely new one. I picked Andrea and thought it was lovely.</p>
<p>Both my S’s have common traditional names but both go by nicknames. S2’s is just a shortened version, the nickname everyone associates with his given name. </p>
<p>S1’s nickname is less common and not always readily associated with his given name. Most people think it is his given name. It is a name that can be male or female. S1 has never complained about his name until this past weekend when he said it had some bad connations connected with a movie that came out a couple of years ago and he gets some flack abut it at college. </p>
<p>H and I told him he had a perfectly good full name and he could feel free to start going by that (or the most familiar nickname) any time he wants too. I did however tell him I woud always call him the name he’s gone by since birth no matter what he told others to call him!</p>
<p>Naming children. WashDadJr is named “John” following an ancient family tradition of naming the oldest child after the wealthiest living relative. Since we don’t have any close relatives who are actually wealthy, we settled for naming him for WashMom’s father. His middle name is the same as my father’s middle name – a traditional Scots name. TallSon was not named Daniel – our first choice – because our best friends had already dibsed that name even though they didn’t have a male child. WashMom didn’t want to “steal” the name from our friends. I sometimes don’t understand WashMom. So we picked another name and then gave him “Daniel” as a middle name, thereby earning a bonus point from my mom, since that was my deceased stepfather’s middle name.</p>
<p>It would have just been easier to name them after television stars.</p>
<p>Name factoid: The name “Madison” for a girl was virtually unknown before the movie Splash came out. One of the jokes in the movie was that the mermaid chose this utterly inappropriate name from a road sign in Manhattan.</p>
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<p>ROFL!
HAs the ancient family tradition had any positive financial benefits, WashDad???</p>