Exactly, Massmom!
Further, it is a long tradition as many would give their kids combinations of ancestral names so that they’d remember where they came from when they were inevitably ripped from their mother.
Slavery was really NOT that long ago. I think we tend to forget that.
And really, many of those seemingly made-up names aren’t actually made up. Take, for instance -
Which are no more made-up than, say, Bentley or Lux.
I don’t like cutesy names either…or names that sound like future strippers.
My daughter’s best friend had a baby girl and named her Josephine …that sounds like and old lady name to me.
My daughters have rather traditional, classic names. And they all have songs with their names in them
It seems as if there are many more names used now than in prior generations. D’s name was in the top 10 for girls the year she was born (not why we chose it, I always loved the name), but in her HS class of 400 students she was the only one with the name. She didn’t know of more than 1 or 2 girls a little older/younger with that name.
In contrast, I have a name that was popular in my generation and I grew up with lots of girls who shared my name.
When we use words like “traditional” and “classic” can we be more specific? Traditionally what? Traditionally white, British, Irish, German, what?
We use terms like classic and traditional as meaning, by default, white/European. It’s worth remembering that we treat white like the invisible descriptor.
"Lakeisha: A Swahili name meaning “favorite one”
Lateefah: A North African name meaning “gentle and pleasant”
Latonia: A Latin name. Latonia was the mother of Diana in Roman mythology
Latisha: Modern variant of the saint’s name Letitia, means “happiness”
Takiya: A North African Arabic name meaning “righteous” "
I confess I didn’t know this - I would have thought many of these names were just completely made up out of thin air, and didn’t realize that they had Swahili or North African roots. (Though what was wrong with Letitia as it was?) Thank you for sharing this. Learn something new!
The only Josephine I knew growing up was a great aunt. In the last few years I have heard of several people using that name. My other great aunts - Stella and Lucy also have trendy names now.
Doing some family research, everyone had very similar names. These were French and Catholic so every woman was Marie something, Marie Claire, Marie Amelie, etc. The men were Jean this and that. Thank goodness there were a few “oddities” in there - a man named Abraham, a woman named Felicite - it made it much easier to track the proper family tree.
My grandmother was named Josephine - or so we thought. She’s actually Guiseppina on her birth certificate!
Katherine/Catherine, Zoe/Zoey - not to mention McKenzie/MacKenzie/Makenzie/Mackenzi? Letisha/Letitia is hardly the only name to have multiple spellings, variants, and modern adaptations, so I’m not sure how it differs.
romani - names can place you, and not just in race terms. It’s easy to think that Lakeesha is black, Mary is white, Juanita is hispanic, etc. I heard a radio show once where they asked people to call in with “white trash” names. They mentioned Crystal, Brittany, Shawna, etc. It’s hard not to make automatic, and potentially racist, associations with names, but we should all try. I find myself disliking the Blake, Madison, and Taylor names since they seem made up to me. I try to suppress it though.
My daughter had a young African American ENT doctor whose name was just so improbable. I won’t mention it here because you could probably track her, but her first name is shared with a Von Trapp child and her last name could be associated with Robin Hood. You never know!
How about traditional American? Two of my best friends growing up were black girls named Debbie and Janice. If names are placing you somehow it’s not accidental. I don’t see how it’s racist though.
Lakeesha is a combination of syllables that has become very popular and each syllable is from somewhere but the combo is made up and the spelling varies.
Sometimes a name in one culture just doesn’t sound right in another. A name that should be pronounced similar to “annul” with the “hard n” sound is often spelled with one n and an a instead of a u. Also “fakir” where the a is pronounced as a u - not that common as a name.
Not a modern day one, but back on my family tree, we have Asahel who married Aseneth. I always thought those were two horrible names. No one named their children after them.
I’ll say again. ALL NAMES are made up. There was no definitive book of baby names at the dawn of humanity.
I thought one’s stripper name was your first pet’s name and the name of the street you grew up on. Snowball Main, for example.
I knew a girl in school named Candy Kane. Also a boy named Chris Cross. Not the ones who come up on google search.
Re Josephine: My daughter, born in 1995, had TWO Josephines in her grade at a pretty small elementary school. So surprising! (To be clear, that’s not my daughter’s name).
I’m not a huge fan of made-up spellings, but so many spellings that may appear made up to some are traditional in other cultures – like Krisztina, Emilie, or Cecylia. I tend to like some of those, once I find out their origins.
My (American) cousin named her baby one of those Gaelic names in which the spelling does not correspond to English-language phonetics. That would have been fine, but she spelled in wrong in Gaelic! That one drives me crazy for some reason. (It’s an uncommon name, not a familiar Gaelic name like Siobhan or Sinead).
I have a friend from Paris who told me, when I was pregnant with my daughter, that the chicest names in Paris at that time were Agnes and Balthasar. (Agnes with the accent mark; can’t do it on my phone.). After that, I kept waiting for Agnes to make a comeback here, which obviously never happened. Sounds better in French.
I grew up with a VERY common name for my generation. My name is Susan and in my HS of about 3600 students, the most common girl’s name was Susan (there were 90 of them). The most common boy’s name in my HS was Michael. I married a Michael and one of my brothers’ names is Michael (in fact, both were born on the same day in the same year).
Thus, when we had kids, I didn’t want the kids to have the MOST common names, though wasn’t looking to be too unusual or way out or some such. I didn’t like having a super common name and having to often use my first name and first initial of my last name in school because there were too many with my name. I have two daughters and their names are not highly unusual, but are not super common either.
When we were coming up with names for our first baby, and we didn’t know the gender, we had narrowed the female names down to 3 in my 8th month. We had already settled on a name if the baby was a boy. Anyway, we were having a picnic on rocky cliffs on the Maine coast and deliberating what to name the baby if it was a girl and mulled over the final three choices. Two of the choices were Jessica and Chelsea and while I liked those names a lot, I am very glad we did not name her either one as both ended up being super common for her year (born in 1986). But as we were discussing this and we asked, should we name her Jessica, Chelsea, or X (I don’t want to mention X here as that is her name), a seagull perched himself near our picnic and started making a one syllable sound. And I thought to myself, wow, the seagull made the sound of the first syllable in the “X” name, but I didn’t want to tell my husband or he might think I was nuts to think the seagull had answered our question, but he turned to me and said he thought the seagull kept saying the first part of the X name too! So, we decided if it was a girl, we would name her that X name and we took a photo of the seagull perched on the rock by us to remember it. She was indeed a girl and we named her X and an enlarged framed photo of this seagull who helped us name her has hung in her room from babyhood until recently (sold the house, saved the photo).
My other daughter’s name has 3 possible spellings and I definitely didn’t want an unusual spelling (feel sorry for those that have one) and so we picked the boldface entry (most common) spelling of her name in baby books, not to mention that it is spelled phonetically as well. But many still spell it wrong.
soozie- that’s hilarious.
My parents were convinced I was a boy but they had a boy name and girl name picked out. Then, when I came out a girl, my dad said “Oh, I don’t like that name at ALL.” So I was nameless for a few days before they settled on my name 