Thursday 15 March 2012

The ass in Titus

A pregnant friend of mine told me about this phenomenal American baby names site in which people write in with their name dilemmas and the site author answers:

http://swistlebabynames.blogspot.com/

Here's a sample:

"After struggling to conceive, my husband and I have been blessed with a pregnancy. We are due October 1st. DH doesn't want to know the sex of the baby, and I don't have strong feelings about needing to know, so we're preparing two sets of names. The names need to fit in with several family traditions. We've decided to use his last name (Moore), but my family of origin traditions for first and middle names.

Traditions

1. In my family, the middle name Oliver is a tradition for the first born male in a generation (it's my brother's middle name, my grandfather's middle name, my great-grandfather's middle name etc.). Since I am the first sibling to have a child in my family, I'd like to use Oliver in the middle for a boy.

2. The second tradition in my immediate family is to have the initials spell out an additional name. For instance, my initials spell AMY. I loved growing up with a "secret" extra name and want my child to have the same gift. Also, I think my parents would be thrilled if I carried on the pattern they started with my siblings and me.

My husband and I have had no trouble coming up with girl names to fit this pattern. Currently, our favorites are Genevieve Elise (GEM) and Penelope Alice (PAM). We wouldn't turn down more suggestions at this point, since we have a ways to go yet, but we need much more help with a boy's name. Other first names for girls that we like but that don't fit the initials pattern include Celeste, Lydia, and Cecilia.

The boy's name is giving us more trouble since there are two traditions restricting our choices. Basically, with Oliver in the middle, the most reasonable option is to find a first name starting with T to get to TOM. If we don't use Oliver, we are considering Simon Arthur (SAM), although I'd probably rather break with the initials tradition than the Oliver tradition, so maybe we'll just reserve that for a second boy, if we are blessed enough to have one."
Better still is her reason for not choosing one T name - "Titus - Husband says it has the word ass in it, so it's out."

I've known about this site for a week and dare not admit how many hours I have already spent reading it.

1 comment:

  1. Damn you!!! Another timewaster to bookmark along with "damnyouautocorrect"!!!!

    ReplyDelete