What's in a name

Last night we had a PhD student over to our place to talk about names. She is doing her doctoral dissertation on how people choose names for their children and is looking to interview 60 families about their decision process. We thought it would be nice to help a student out, plus we got $20 for the interview. She also recorded our conversation on a digital recorder which made me feel both more interesting and more important than I know myself to be, but it was fun while it lasted.

She started by having us each talk about our own names and how we feel about them. Eric didn't have a strong feeling about his name but said he liked it.

"As a kid it was good because the only thing it rhymes with is 'generic' and that wasn't an insult kids got very fired up about," he shared.

In contrast, Ellie rhymes with "belly" and "like a bowl full of jelly" as well as "smelly" which are particularly unfortunate for a chubby girl with poor hygiene.

But I actually like my name a lot and in spite of a psychic I went to a few years ago telling me that I would choose to go by a new name starting around October 2010, I am actually quite happy to keep it.

We shared the name brackets that we used to inform our choice of Emerson, though not as directly as some might have hoped. She dug into why we liked certain names, what we liked about them and what we thought was important in a name, and even gave us a list of 10 names each for girls and boys and had us rate them and then explain why.

In the end she summed up what we were looking for in a name as "an established (ie not made up) name that is not too popular but not weird."

I think that's pretty close. And I still plan to scan her final thesis to see if she mentions our names anywhere.