Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Naming Rights

X-man woke me up an hour ago with his 3:30 panic. He's back to sleep now, but I can't seem to keep my eyes shut. So I thought I'd blog about the stupid thing in my head that is keeping me up -- Naming children.

One of MacTroll's three older brothers and his very cool wife had a baby this week. (Congrats!) It's their second and probably the last baby on MacTroll's side of the family. The baby's name is Emmett Steven. There are four other boys on that side of the family: Nathan Michael, Owen Kenneth, Samuel Frederick and Xander Cruz. 

Everyone except Xander has a middle name named after their father or grandfather (or father's middle name). Xander's not named after anyone. Plus, he has my last name. 

So my current insomniac wonder is why boys are more often named after the males in their family, while girls usually aren't named after their mothers. For example in the same family, only one girl out of three shares a name with a mother/grandmother (at least that I know of). 

Had X-man been a girl, he would have been Kady Cruz. Kady was kind of a combination of my first name with my best friend's first name, but he would have had MacTroll's last name. 

I was apparently expected to be a boy before I was born. Had I been one, my name would have been Daniel Grant. Daniel is the name of my father and my paternal grandfather. Grant is the last name of my mother's favorite grandfather (and technically my maternal grandmother's maiden name). They kept the Grant when I was born and shortened the Daniel to Dana. Soooo, I guess I'm a girl named after men. (A shout out to others with gender neutral names, who might have been put in the wrong gender dorms when she/he entered college on an "oops.")

Anyway, I just wondered what it was in culture that made us label our boys with the names of their forefathers -- but not label girls after their foremothers. I mean, you just don't meet a lot of Carol Marie Smith III out there, ya know?

P.S. I know there are exceptions: I have a friend who is Karen Ann (Ann is her mother's name) and the name Ann has rotated between first name/middle name in her family for daughters for a few generations. 

5 comments:

~rachel~ said...

I HATE Jr. names and the 3rd. I always just bothered by the fact that I was suppose to take my husbands last name, let alone the whole first and middle name thing.

Rowan's middle name is Michael, something I really didn't want to do, but Richard(my grandpa's name) didn't sound right with Rowan. Eli got Richard, but if eaither had been a girl middle name would have been Norine- mine and my grandma's middle name.

I was always really close to my grandparents so I wanted to name them after them, but I probably wouldn't do it just because. I'm not really close to my other grandma or Mike's grandparents so their names were never even considered. I hate how it is almost expected. Mike's grandpa dies when I was pregnant with Eli and we didn't even tell them what his middle name would be because they all seemed to be hinting that it should be after him.

makeup_girl said...

I was reading an intro to a book the other day, and the author was telling a story about her mother. Her mother had the same first name as HER mother. They were from Romania. I found that fascinating because my grandmother was from Poland, and she gave her daughter (my aunt) her first name too. I wonder if it has something to do with the region. Hmmm.

I have a cousin whose name is Cyndee, and her mother's name is Cindy.

I gave Ella Christine a version on my middle name, Christy. "Ella" was B's mother's middle name, so I wanted her to have a part of me.

I don't think kids should be named "jr." or "the 3rd" either. I think it sets some sort of invisible standard on who they should be.

Misc said...

My daughter's middle name is the same as my aunt's middle name (Mallory), a name I've always loved.

Evan's middle name is the same as my father's (Thomas). If Flynn would've been a boy the name would've been Gavin Karl (Karl was my FIL's name). Had Evan been a girl the name we'd picked was Robin Kathleen. My sister's a Kathleen.

My grandmother named me. The story goes that my parents could not decide between Amanda and Marissa. My dad's mom said, "Her name is Melissa." End of story. My middle name is Sue, my mother's sister's name. Had I been a boy, my mom wanted the name Geoffrey (a respelling of my dad's middle name).

Funny what our brains come up with in the middle of the night, huh?

Quigs78 said...

Bubba has my maiden name as his middle name. Neil didn't want his name or his father's name to be used since it's floated around the family forever, and I still wanted part of my name in there. (I'm sure both of our fathers were disappointed with that choice, but they had their chance to name their kids.)

PG's first name is just one that we could both agree on, but the shortened version gets a lot of boy comments. Her middle name is after my best friend of 15 years - who is just as much my family, if not more so, than anyone blood related.

Amy said...

JB has my maiden name as his middle name. I've always liked the name so I decided long ago that if I ever had a child whether it was a boy or a girl it would have my maiden name in there somewhere.

I wanted WW to have my grandmother's middle name as her middle name, but The Joker said that name sounded like a witch. So she got the longer version of The Joker's name.