10 Names You Would Have Named Yourself

Photo Credit: kevinzim via Compfight cc

When I saw this Listicle topic, I was thrilled--I've been obsessed with names & naming for several years now. Since right around the time I got pregnant the first time, unsurprisingly enough. Even before that, when I was a child, I spent a lot of time thinking of names I'd prefer to my extremely common one. Never quite did settle on one & eventually, I was happy enough with my name. I've plumbed the depths of my memories to find the names I would have named myself & listed them for you here:

1. Lisa Marie. Okay, these are actually my first & middle names, but I thought maybe I'd go by both, rather than just Lisa. Unfortunately, the whole Elvis Presley's daughter connection wasn't really something I wanted to emphasize, especially in the mid-90s with her odd marriage to Michael Jackson.
2. Zelda. This was actually the name of my first Cabbage Patch Kid, so I don't know if I would have taken it, it was more just that I always thought names starting with Z were extra cool. For the record, this was before the Legend of Zelda video game came out.
3. Cassiopeia. I've always loved names of constellations & this one is a favourite, as I can always spot it in the sky. Bonus: it shortens nicely to a more common name: Cassie.
4. Kollontai. It's the surname of a Russian revolutionary who was one of the foremost champions of women's rights at the time. Aside from the obscure lefty cred, the name ticks another box of being gender-neutral, which is something I've favoured for names a lot of my life.
5. Linnaea. This Swedish gem I didn't actually discover until 2010, when I was searching for names for what my intuition told me was a daughter. 20-week ultrasound told us baby was a boy & we went back to the drawing board, eventually tracing this girl's name back to it's roots as the scientist who named the flower that Linnaea comes from.
6. Indigo. I favoured this one when I was in my neo-hippy days in my late teens. Never actually used it as a moniker, but I still love the colour.
7. Libelle. I seriously considered this one for my daughter, actually. It's pronounced lee-BELL-uh, the German word for dragonfly. Nobody would have ever pronounced it properly here & it looks a little too much like libel, so we didn't pick it. I did actually use it myself as an online identity sometimes. My screen name for a number of websites & even my original Twitter handle was 'Blaue Libelle' (blue dragonfly).
8. Yseult. Another one that ticks the box of unusual initials, this one also reflects my francophilia. It's pronouced ee-ZEUH, though I bet nobody would ever get it right here in Western Canada. The name comes from the 12th century French legend, Tristan & Iseult. 
9. Corriveau. I know, I know, this is in fact my surname. I thought about going by my last name when I was in high school. My best friend at the time called me that--I think it was the influence of English boarding school culture on us. Well, actually, my friend got lazy & shortened it to 'Corv', & I didn't really stick with it. She still calls me 'Corv' to this day, though.
10. Elsie. This I favoured when I was nine or ten years old. My initials made into a name. A name that sounds like a 97-year-old woman. Too bad I didn't stick with that one. *snort*

Though it is a bit annoying to be one of several Lisas, the fact that it's so common has been an advantage sometimes. As an ESL teacher, virtually nobody had trouble remembering it because the sounds in it are common to most languages in the world. Another bonus: I nearly never get asked how to spell or pronounce it. It's simple, easygoing & it reflects the era I was born into. 

How about you? Did you want to have a different name when you were a kid? Or did you actually change yours? Spill!

Join in the fun yourself--enter the link to your list here (click on the Listicles button to the right), or just browse the many other entries on Northwest Mommy.

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How We Named Our Children: A Tale of Flowers & Thunder

Linnaeus Bastien & Brontë Sonja. I know, they're kinda weird names. My poor children will probably hate me every time they have to fill in a form too, as they've both got a double-barrelled last name that includes my all-the-vowels nine-letter french-canadian moniker plus their father's short-but-still-unspellable teutonic surname. A lot of people have asked how we decided on these particular names or what they mean, so I thought I'd write a post about it.

Linnaeus the botanist, via WikiMedia Commons

Sprout's Name Story

Linnaeus, as you might know, is an 18th century Swedish botanist, famous for developing the system we use to this day for plant & animal identification. However, we didn't start by saying, "Hey, we love this name, let's use it on our son!". I had a strong hunch I was carrying a girl when I was pregnant with Linnaeus, so I was more focussed on the list of girls' names. The 20 week ultrasound showed otherwise, so we set our girls' names list aside & started narrowing down the boys' list. 

I vetoed Oli's suggestions of Falco & Haldor. The initials with the former would be somewhat disastrous, no matter what the middle name. Imagine if we'd called him Falco Ulysses Corriveau-Kuehn? Gah! Haldor, well, it might sound all Viking & stuff, but it's also a character from World of Warcraft. Just doesn't seem an appropriate place to be taking names from.

I had ideas like Orin, Stirling, Kiefer & sorta liked Joachim (pronounced the German way, yo-AH-khum). But none of them really seemed right. By the time Linnaeus was born, we still didn't really have a solid shortlist. The week he was born, we went back to the girls' list & took our favourite--Linnaea, which is a little flower that grows in Sweden & Canada--tracing it back to the botanist who named it. Karl Von Linne, or Carolus Linnaeus, since anybody important got latinized in those days. The name Linne actually has its origins in the word Linden, as in the tree, which pleases the crunchy-earth-muffin side of me.

Linnaeus' middle name was easier to pick--I think Bastien had been on my list--it also happened to be the first name of a soccer player on the German team at the World Cup that year. After some Googling to make sure he wasn't someone we wouldn't want our son's name associated with (no criminal convictions, no sex scandals, that sort of thing) we decided on it. I preferred the French spelling of Bastien, rather than Bastian, & that was it. The short form of Sebastian, which the Baby Name Wizard posits is likely a derivation of the Latin name Sebastianus, which is derived from the Greek word "sebastos" meaning "venerable" & closely related to the Latin "augustus"--the same meaning.

Anne, Emily & Charlotte Brontë, via WikiMedia Commons

Bug's Name Story

When it came to Brontë's name, we didn't spend that much time thinking about what to call her. We kept procrastinating... & then she was born. I wasn't happy with my list of girls' names from my previous pregnancies. Things like Raven, Callisto, Cassiopeia, Ponderosa... I just didn't really like them anymore. Because we'd stolen our best girl's name for Linnaeus, we more or less had to start over. 

I really wanted to give her a name that went well with her brother's name, something with a little weight to it. I favour surnames as first names--obviously--but I like ones that are pretty rare. Brontë as a first name is actually less rare than Linnaeus--it's not that unusual in Australia. Brontë was actually on my list from a while ago, but Oliver hadn't really been in favour of it, as he thought it was too 'anglo'. I mean, yes, how much more anglo can you get than using the surname of three of England's most famous writers? 

There's another meaning to the name, which some of my friends & family have already figured out: Bronte means 'thunder' in Greek. I had the idea to name my daughter something that meant thunder in another language because of the thunderstorms when I was in labour & shortly after her birth. Thunderstorms are relatively rare here & I really love them. We almost settled on Aska, which means thunder in Swedish. However, I just couldn't commit to that name after thinking about it for a couple of weeks. The pronunciation is a bit foreign--it is supposed to sound a bit like Oscar, but without the R--so no one would ever say it right. I was also a bit wary of just picking a word out of Google Translate, in case there was some connotation that we weren't aware of, as neither of us speaks Swedish. The final strike against Aska was that her name would sound like a sentence: Ask a ___... 

I realized that Brontë fit the bill for thunder, as well as being the solid kind of adult name that she could grow into. So my next step was to try to convince Oliver, who, to be honest, is still coming around to the name. I offered a compromise: if we used Brontë as her first name, he could choose her middle name. Oliver went for this & decided on naming her after his mother, Sonja. Though I felt that it's sort of uneven in a way to name one child for a family member & only one side of the family, I think the name works. Sonja doesn't get to see her grandchildren very much, living 400km away, & I know she'll appreciate the namesake. 

There you have it: the story behind the names. Now you tell me: how did you choose your child(ren)'s names? Please leave a comment below--I'd love to hear about your process!

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Introducing...

Baby girl finally, officially has a name:

Photo: Jackie Dives, Birth Doula & Photographer

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Review: Expert Tools on Baby Name Wizard

I've been a fan of Baby Name Wizard for years. I can't for the life of me remember where I heard about the site, as it was several years ago. I started following the Baby Name Wizard blog, written by Laura Wattenberg, not just for ideas of what to name Sprout, but because it's really interesting. Even if you've already named your children, dog, cat, fish & boat, it's interesting to discuss naming trends & look at the origins of names.

One of the best things about Baby Name Wizard is the tools available on the site. Namefinder, Namipedia, Name Voyager & Name Mapper all allow you to look at names in a different way, for free.

Namefinder allows you to search a vast database of names by gender, first letter, number of letters, popularity, origins, etc. So much easier to use than those baby name books that basically work like a phone directory!

Namipedia gives you the origins & pronunciation of each name, as you'd expect from any baby name book. Where it gets better than that is the crowd-sourced information on famous people with the name, nicknames & even sibling names that go with it.

Name Voyager is probably one of my favourite tools, though it's the simplest. It gives you a graph showing the popularity names, based on US data since the 1800s. Try typing in your name, or better yet, the first few letters to see similar names, & see what happens!

Name Mapper is also a great visual tool, showing the popularity of names in the US by state.

If you're truly a name geek or, perhaps expecting a baby, you can subscribe to the Expert Tools to get even more functions:

Expert Name Finder uses data & algorithms exclusive to Baby Name Wizard to learn about your taste, suggesting names that "match,” while you guide it with expert controls including the starting letters, length & even connotations of the name. You can check out a demontration video here.

Name Matchmaker works to help you find names that you like by giving examples & narrowing down the selection for you. It's pretty amazing & the demonstration video here explains far better than I can how it all works.

Name Voyager Expert is a visual tool that allows you to see a graph showing the popularity of names in the US. You can find combinations of letters anywhere within a name, for exmaple all names with a "Q" in them, or ending in "-ette." Or you can narrow your search based on name popularity, past & present.

This is just a brief synopsis of what Baby Name Wizard can do--if you've made it this far in my post without heading over there already, you really should! & if you are seriously looking for a baby name--try subscribing for a trimester, nine months or annually!


Visit Baby Name Wizard, follow them on Facebook or Twitter too!


Disclaimer: I received a free subscription to Expert Name tools with Baby Name Wizard in return for writing a review of the service.

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What's in a Name: Popularity

BC's Top 20 Girls' Names in 2012, made on Wordle.net

Names have been back on my radar for a while now that we've got the responsibility of coming up with one for the wiggly little girl in my belly. Embarrassingly enough, we just haven't really come up with anything that we agree on. One thing I do know is that I don't want to giver her a really popular name.

I recently read a post on Laura Wattenburg's blog, The Baby Name Wizard, about what makes certain names popular. She has a sort of formula which make a lot of sense, based on the community you live in, as well as the more subjective psychological factors that determine what we think is popular or not. Read the rest here.

If you're interested in names, or needing to come up with one sometime soon like us, Laura publishes a great site with tons of resources for researching the popularity, geographic variation & associations with various names. The site is all based on US Social Security information, however. It doesn't include data from Canada, or any other countries. You can find her 'Namipedia', 'Name Voyager', etc in the drop-down menu on the top left: Basic Name Tools. She also offers more tools by subscription access too, if you are really keen. For more info on the Expert Name Tools, I'll be posting a review of them tomorrow here on Spokesmama!

For more local data on name popularity, I look at BC's Vital Statistics Agency site. They publish a list of the top 20 most used baby names in the province in the past year. You can also scroll down from the girls' & boys' top 20 lists to see the frequency of any other names given to at least 5 children that year. Sprout's real name, Linnaeus, doesn't appear on the list, as there were fewer than 5 babies given it that year. Vital Stats is also getting in on the graphics, so you can create charts to compare the popularity of names over the years here.

If we had a family tradition of naming the kids after their ancestors, this would probably be easier. Despite having a lot of resources at my disposal to help come up with a name from scratch, we're still not there yet. Baby girl is due in less than a week, so the pressure is on!

How did you choose names for your kids (or pets, for that matter)? Did you have a short list or just wait until they arrived? Did you start to call them by their name before you actually met them?

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A First Name Basis... With My Toddler?

"Lisa! Oliver!"

This week, for reasons unknown to me, Sprout has started calling us by our first names. In particular, when he wants to get our attention. He'll sometimes call me Mama Lisa as well, which isn't so bad, but hearing my not-quite-three-year-old call me Lisa is just weird. I have to say, I wasn't expecting him to go through a stage where he wants to be on a first name basis with us until he was at least 13...

Maybe it's good he knows our 'real' names in case he 'escapes' again. Nearly a year ago, he quietly slipped out the gate during his second birthday party. With three dozen people around, most of them adults, nobody noticed he was gone for ten minutes or so. He walked along the sidewalk, going just around the corner about five houses down when he was discovered by a couple of passers by who called the police. They were with him about ten minutes, but at age two, he couldn't even really tell them his own name, let alone his parents' or his address.

Were you surprised by anything your kid(s) did this week? 

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