@Hanna I have, but my Chinese name is at least phonetically similar to my Western name, although the etymology is different of course. That doesn’t really bother me; being addressed as Juan Pablo for 50 minutes a day if my real name were Patrick does bother me. Perhaps that’s just me. 
Basil is not an uncommon name in Europe. Common in Greece and Russia.
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A tweenager in my extended family has a name that's fairly uncommon in the US. That's rather surprising because it's quite common in both French and Spanish cultures. It is less common, but not unusual in the Netherlands and in Brazil. i don't know if her parents realize it, but the pronunciation they gave it is not how it is pronounced in either French or Spanish.--or Portuguese or Dutch, for that matter. I've never said anything to her parents about it.<<<
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Sounds like a trivia puzzle.
I know, Xiggi; tell us what it is when you figure it out! The clues are just tantalizing enough to make me want to try and figure it out!
“Basil is not an uncommon name in Europe. Common in Greece and Russia.”
Sadly for both kids, they live in the U.S.
OTOH, one does live in the Bay Area, where names can be… creative. Years ago, I worked at a fancy little daycare in the Berkeley hills where we had a boy named Sequoia and another boy named – I kid you not – Eros.
Ines/Inez ?
I should have thought before I posted. If any frequent poster figures it out, please PM me and I’ll tell you if you’re right. PlEASE do not post the name on the board. As I said, she’s never been teased about her name, and I don’t want to take the admittedly small risk that someone will see her name in a post and started teasing her --or any other child with the same name–about how close it is to a body part! For some reason, it never seems to have crossed the mind of her classmates.
ETA: It is not Ines/Inez…but please no more public guesses. I know, i know, I asked for it, but please don’t/
Now it sounds like a Seinfeld episode…
“Gloriola? Mulva? OH!!! It’s Delores!”
edited to eliminate “public guess” (and in some crazy Freudian slip I almost left the ‘l’ out of that word)
@saintfan, jonri asked that we not guess. I wasn’t guessing, just quoting a line from a Seinfeld episode. If by some chance one of those was the name, I’d ask @jonri to see if a mod would delete the post.
^^ In which case we’d know it was right.
“we had a boy named Sequoia.”
I had a friend in Boulder who named her son Sequoia!
I’ve always thought that the social security ranking was not a good random sample. It appears to have some biases to me.
@emilybee, I always said that Boulder was a whiter, cleaner Berkeley-in-the-mountains
^LOL!
At least since babies were assigned social security numbers at birth, the social security data is not a random sample. I believe the ranking is based on full data set of social security applications.
I believe sampling was used for earlier periods.
Just saw the craziest spelling for Sherrie / Sherry / Cherie…it is ‘Schaarie’. Looks scary to me, or is that scarrie?
I would pronounce that as Shari, Like Shari Lewis of Lambchop fame.
Watching spring training yesterday reminded me that high on my list of boy names that I dislike is ‘Dustin’. To me it falls into the category that someone so nicely outlined earlier of “Fake Cowboy Names” except it isn’t a strong name. It’s kind of the suburban version of Colt or Dakota. On a side note, who would have imagined that Dakota would become a go-to unisex name? Have those people actually BEEN to the Dakotas, I wonder? But maybe that idea of a vast expanse of nothingness was what they were going for 