Beyond Lucy and Oliver

Two days ago, I posted about what my favorite movies say about me; then yesterday, I complained about the evolving terminology of the yuppie/bobo/neo-yuppie continuum (although, I looked up neo-yuppie, and while there are very few references, the only two I did find are people who think they’re above using cell phones and think they’re too cool for Christmas. So, yeah, using that as a class — especially to be singled out for scorn — is more fair than I allowed yesterday.) Anyway, it struck me that even making a connection between the movies I like and my personality is a pretty Bobo-ish thing to do, but that’s the kind of self-referential world we live in. I maybe sorta hate it, but I definitely do it.

I’ve got one of those black and white cat clocks on my back wall behind my ’50s style ice cream table with original stools; I throw around terms like “swell” and “grand,” and deliberately fuck up my grammar; I drink Natty Boh and Yellow Tail chardonnay (not together). And then I create an entire narrative around the things I own, the words I use, and the kind of drinks I like. I guess to some extent everyone does this, maybe with different categories — music? fashion? — and maybe to different ends.

But some of these things have limitations beyond taste — what you own may be limited by budget, space, and need; and some, like the kind of language we use, aren’t all that concrete. But the ultimate declaration of taste has to be baby names. Yeah, that sounds selfish — choosing the name of a child to reflect the styles of the parent — but how else should it be done? I’m hardly the first person to notice this — the number of books written on baby naming styles has grown exponentially, there are dozens of websites and message boards dedicated to baby names, and the strangely addictive if overrated book on economics and sociology — Freakonomics — has an entire chapter on the way parents name their kids.

I don’t have any children, and don’t plan to anytime soon, but I already have the names picked out. As I’ve discovered, that’s not all that unusual. I went to lunch at work the other day with two other women in their late 20s/early 30s, and somehow the topic came up. None of us are married, none of us have children, but we all knew exactly what we would name them if we did (our kids, not our husbands). And this isn’t a young-girl-planning-her-wedding type crowd. We didn’t pick the names out of some maternal instinct or wishful thinking for children. We had all chosen names that reflected our taste in everything else. On a sidenote, considering all the time I have put into selecting the perfect names, I am a little amazed that my first posting about this subject is my 91st overall post.

Okay, time to shed the analysis, and get right back to all that self-referentialism… it is my blog.

I like really old names, but not necessarily timeless classics. They have to be playful rather than formal (although a formal version is okay on the birth certificate), aggressively blunt, laid back, and easy to picture as hell-raising young adults in the early 20th century. My favorite of the names books — The Baby Names Wizard — refers to my style as “Guys and Dolls” and as a group, that style is apparently on a moderate upswing, though nothing like the more saccharine-y antique names like Sophie, Isabella, Lucy, Oliver, Julian, and Maxwell. In the same book, those names are considered “antique charm” and while they aren’t my style, they are quintessential Bobo names, and they are certainly very popular among my circle of friends.

The names that are considered annoyingly trendy, like Jaydon, Kylee, Logan, and Taylor, generally annoy me less than the Bobo names, mostly because I don’t actually know anyone who names their kids Jaydon or Kylee or Logan or Taylor, so they don’t sound all that trendy to me.  Actually, in my mind, the winner of most annoying name is Sebastian — pretentious, decorative, and absent of a good nickname (I don’t count Seb). Even worse is the parent who won’t allow the use of a nickname with their child (”No, not Danny… Daniel.”)

Personally, I like Nell and Rosie for my daughters, and Gus and Mack for my sons. Most of these would have formal versions (Eleanor, Rose, and Augustus… I think Mack would stand alone), but they would always go by the nickname. I also like some of the quirkier, turn of the century nicknames for very classic names — May for Margaret, Bess for Elizabeth, Ned for Edward, Hank for Henry, and a couple of names that just kind of fell off the radar for no particular reason, like Mabel, Roy or Frank. For boys, I like some of those really solid, blunt names — Charlie, Joe, Willie, Sam — but those might be a bit too boring, and in the case of Sam and now Charlie, are climbing the popularity charts.

Within my top choices, there are a couple of moderate taste differences, and I go back and forth on the style I prefer.  Gus and Nell have more of that rocking chair and sweatshirt understated style.  They’re laid back and rumpled, the kind of names that make a statement by not making a statement.  Then there’s Mack and Rosie.  Like Gus and Nell, they are turn of the century names that are perfectly unaffected.  But Mack and Rosie have a higher energy level to them.  They’re names that fit extroverts, athletes, and trouble-makers.  As I said, I go back and forth on my preference.

The main criticism I get about my taste in names is that they sound like dog names.  Okay, maybe so, but I don’t see what’s so bad about that.  Dogs are friendly, loyal, laid back and lovable — those are traits that I wish were more evident in the people I know.  I do have a couple of guilty pleasures though, like Bucky and Lulu and Roxie, that I don’t think I would be brave enough to actually use, so it isn’t as though I don’t care at all what others think.

Maybe at some point, I’ll have a reason to put these names to use, and then just hope that the child lives up to all the traits I envision in the name.  Until then, I’ll just have to pore over names books always trying to perfect my list, while drinking a Natty Boh, looking at my cat clock, and bastardizing the English language.

See what happens when we go weeks without a primary?  I get way over-analytical.  Can’t even imagine what I’ll do in 2009.