(Note: I asked my MOH’s permission to use his name on here. He laughed and said yeah.)
My best friend’s name is Nickolas (and a similarly common but “misspelled” middle name). Very white, very educated parents chose to give him that name. Too “creative” of a spelling? Too cutesy? Does it make a difference at all that they are heritage names and the parents chose purposely to use their traditional spellings rather than what some Euro-Americans believe should be the correct spelling?
My best friend in junior high was a Sara. It was considered pretty unusual at the time. In my kids’ age cohort, it everywhere.
My dd teaches English in China and the students often prefer to be called by English names. Some have been interesting- Lovely, Precious, Sparkle, Shiny and our personal favorite- Yak.
LaVaughn has been a name for over 100 years.<<<
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Well, perhaps the self-anointed resident CC historian might expand on the origins and the history of such creations.
My grandmother’s name was LaFon. The only other person I’ve ever heard of with that name was Al Gore’s sister who died a number of years ago. I never heard the story on how she got that name. She was not French, either.
Vaughn is an old name with Welsh origins. The La prefix, not so much.
I believe the made up names giving folks issues are the ones with excessive and out-of-nowhere Las, Shas, Jas, Laylas, Keeshsas, Kaylas, Tay Tays, etc., often with over three syllables and occasionally with accent marks. They sound some sort of ethnic but are not and are intentionally creative. The moms doing this are usually very young. Of course, I could be wrong, but that is my impression about the troublesome names.
For those interested in actual real research on these sorts of topics, the American Name Society is a scholarly society that has been in existence for better than half a century, and they publish a well-regarded peer-reviewed journal on the subject titled Names: A Journal of Onomastics. All of us on this thread might do well to look there as a basis for our claims rather than going off of our own expectations and conventional wisdom.
Clapton might disagree on the use of the name Layla
@dfbdfb
See Fryer and Levitt in 2003:
Further, Blacks living in highly segregated Black communities today are much more likely to have distinctively Black names than those in integrated communities, whereas this was not the case in the early 1960’s. Finally, until the late 1970s, the choice of Black names was only weakly associated with socio-economic status; in the 1980s and 1990s distinctively Black names have come to be increasingly associated with mothers who are young, poor, unmarried, and have low education.
Personally, I love the name Layla. Shalaylakeesha is too much. But, to each her own. One of my kids has a silent and uneeded Y. Like Layne or Jayne.
Xiggi, I have a close friend who worked as a social worker right out of college. She worked mostly with children within the lower income bracket in Atlantic City, and yes, they were predominantly black.
She would tell me that a lot of them actually didn’t know how to spell the names they wanted for their children so they would phonetically put the names together. It wasn’t necessarily to be unique or to stand out, but they simply didn’t know how to spell the names they wanted.
“LaFon” That made me think of LaFonda from Napoleon Dynamite!
“My son chose to go by his nickname so that is what I call him now.” If either of my kids objected to being called by us by their 3 syllable names , I would respect that but that hasn’t happened. I asked my oldest what he was going to go by when he went to college and he said he wasn’t sure. We moved him into college and when he introduced himself to one of his suitemates, "Hi, I’m " , I got my answer. He introduced himself with his one syllable nickname and that was that. He ran into a childhood friend he hadn’t seen for awhile though and she called him by his full name and he said it was nice to hear that as he doesn’t hear it as much anymore. But his brother, parents, aunts, childhood friends ,etc. all still call him by his full name and he seems to like that. His college, workplace friends are the ones that tend to shorten his name and he is okay with both ways…
but I do happen to know the history of a lot of La+additional name names—it was an outgrowth of one of the periodic waves of fashionability of the French language in the US, this time in the late-ish 19th century. <<<
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My comment was directed at the onomastics’ guru, Romani – not you.
For historical references to the appendage of La or Le, one might look beyond the fashionable and look at the relation to slavery and ownership of chattel in the South, including Louisiana.
@xiggi: Right—people who share social networks are more likely to share social practices than with those with whom they don’t share social networks. Given that social networks in the US are incredibly influenced by race/ethnicity, and given also that there are confounds between race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, Fryer & Levitt’s findings are utterly unsurprising.
No need to be a historian. Googling turns up historical LaVaughn individuals.
ETA: For kicks, I looked up LaVaughn as a first name on my ancestry account. Almost 3 million records. For reference, only census records up to the 40s are public record (though, of course, there are many more records besides census records on there). Oh, and spot checking shows that they’re all (or at least mostly) listed as white.
Here is a shot of records from familysearch- a completely free website if anyone is interested:
http://www.clipular.com/c/5917663235670016.png?k=HsiusjD9rXnVAjDp-YOfa86HyEs
Hmm…https://familysearch.org/search/record/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3Alavaughn~
I don’t get the point about the Nickolas question. That’s a standard variation of the name Nicholas/Nicolas/Nikolas/Nikolai et al., which is a very common name across many different European languages, with slightly different spellings depending on the language. It doesn’t strike me as being particularly out of the ordinary.
One criteria for baby naming should be "will my kid get teased unmercifully in school with this name? " Layla is one of those names. And if you have the last name of Dover, you should stay away from Benjamin. If your last name is Head, please don’t name your child Richard and if your last name is Hunt, please scratch Michael off the list.
I grew up with a Frank Neil Stein (and of course kids abbreviated the middle name to the initial) and Katherine Litter was of course called Kitty. Really folks. Just, no. Don’t do it to an innocent baby.
Well, people are complaining about Jeffery- even though it’s common in other European countries.
Also, now I’m having fun with this name searching (really, I’m just procrastinating work… but at least I can admit it!). Ladasha was apparently relatively popular among southern whites in the late 1800, early 1900s. Then it fell off and became popular again in the late 80s.
The cycle of names fascinates me.
I don’t like when people choose to name their kids the same name as their last name. Example, John Johns or Thomas Tom, what were they thinking?
@jym626 - I know a woman whose boyfriend’s last name is Bacon. She is already fantasizing about having a son called Chris P.!
