Tag: Wednesday Dichotomy

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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

OK, time for a hypothetical thought experiment kind of thing!

Name two musicians whom you would love to hear in a duet together. The catch? Both must be dead, and have never (to a reasonable degree of confidence in knowledge) performed together in their lifetimes. My choice? John Lennon and John Denver.

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A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter

Roger wrote an interesting post the other day about the process by which he and his wife arrived at their daughter’s name (“Lydia”, which is, by the way, a perfectly lovely name). A taste:

*No naming after any family member, living or dead. I want her to have her own identity. And I didn’t want, “Oh, you named her after Aunt Hortense!” We’ll call her Little Horty!” No, you won’t.

Actually, I would have considered Charlotte, after my great aunt Charlotte, who had died a couple years earlier, truth to tell. And my mother was living in Charlotte, NC; we referred to her, my late father, my baby sister and her daughter as the Charlotte Greens. But The Wife wanted to consider Ann, which is her middle name and her mother’s first name; so I nixed both names.

*No unisex names: Terry, Madison, Lynn, e.g.

This comes directly from the fact that my father AND my sister were both named Leslie. Confusion ensued, and often at my expense. Since my father had a child named Leslie, it was ASSUMED it was his ONLY son, i.e., me. “Hey, little Les,” one guy from church constantly called me. “That’s NOT my name,” I’d mutter under my breath (but never aloud, for that would have been considered rude.)

*It had to have two or more syllables, to balance off the shortness of Green.

That was my other objection to Ann.

This got me to thinking about our own process when The Daughter was born. Basically, we just kind of called out names until we arrived at a first name that we both liked (The Wife liked it more than I did, but I still liked it), and then I basically got to choose the middle name. When it got to be Little Quinn’s turn to be named, we decided to use one of the names we had rejected for The Daughter, plus a middle name that The Wife liked. And later on, we had a lovely name chosen (Fiona) for the girl who was, alas, born too early to live. About the only ‘rule’ we employed, and we didn’t even arrive at this until we were trying for Quinn, that we wanted a five-letter name, since we all have five-letter names. Silly, maybe, but hey — we look for connections, don’t we?

So, folks, what went into your naming processes, whether for kids or cats or goldfish?

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