To me... just about everything. I have always had a slight obsession with names. Even back in my days of youth and sin when having children was the farthest thing from my mind one of my secret pleasures was looking at baby name books. I also enjoyed reading the trash magazines to find out what famous people named their kids and looking at the birth announcements in my local paper to see what names people had picked out.
I don't really know how this came about, it's just something I was always intrigued by. The downside to this interest is that I have formed some pretty strong opinions when it comes to naming that probably makes people a bit mad at me. Which I think is crazy, because I know that there are people that do not like the names I have chosen for my daughters, but it doesn't bother me. They are my kids. You don't have to like their names.
My first pet peeve is naming trends. A few years ago, everyone was naming their little girls Madison and Mackenzie. Today, everyone is naming their kids (male and female) Aidan, Kaden, Hayden, Brayden, and any and every variant thereof. I'm not making this up, either. Aidan and all of its variants is number one on babynames.com. Kaden and Brayden are numbers 3 and 4, respectively. Now, it is not the names themselves that bother me. I have a 4 year old nephew named Kaden, and a close friend with a son named Aidan. I'm not as bothered by their choices of these names because they came about a little bit before the trend exploded, and I know that my friend Wendy named her son Aidan after someone, which I can never really be upset about. I suppose why this bothers me so much is because of my first name. When my mom chose the name (Brittany) it was not completely unusual, but it wasn't crazy popular, either. THen about five years later, EVERYONE was naming their kids Brittany. It got really annoying to me, and is probably a contributing factor to the reason I have chosen to go by my middle name for the last decade or so.
The next bothersome thing on my list... Please for the love of God, people, stop butchering names with cutesy, "unique" spellings. It just makes you look dumb. I know by association two pregnant people right now who are naming their kids Aidan (mistake no. 1), and they are spelling them Ayden and Aidyn, respectively. And if I see one more person butcher the beautiful name Madeline by spelling it Madelyn, Maddelyn, Madelynn, or Maddelynn, I will personally not hesitate to tell them what an idiot they are. Madeline USED to be my favorite girl's name until all of the nonsensical spelling started.
My nest issue is people who give their kids nicknames as actual names. In my book, a child's birth certificate should never read KATIE. You can call your kid Katie as much as you want to, but Katie, in my opinion, is a nickname for Katherine, Katelyn, or Kathleen. Period. Without exception. I call my oldest daughter Sadie, but her name is Sadiya. Katie is a perfectly suitable name for a five year old little girl, but how seriously will she be taken when she is 25, and has to put Katie on her resume? The same goes for Liam (William), Stella (Estelle), and probably a hundred others that I could think of.
That being said, I will gladly share my daughters' names so they can be scrutinized just as I do everyone else's choice. My oldest is Sadiya Reagan, after my grandmother and the great communicator, President Ronald Reagan. Number two, who is scheduled to be here April 20th is Emmaline Daisy, Daisy after my other grandmother, and no significance to Emmaline other than I liked it and it hasn't been on a most popular name list since 1880!
No comments:
Post a Comment