Give Your Baby a Gr8 Name (off-topic weekend post!)

I guess it was only a matter of time before our combined love of text messages and a general devolution of the written word would seep into naming our kids.

Via the blog Fritinancy I caught this article from UK’s Daily Mail:

“Abbreviated versions of traditional Christian names are appearing on birth certificates along with “original” ways of spelling which even include punctuation marks. Anne has been changed to An, Connor to Conna and Laura to Lora.

There were reportedly six boys who were named Cam’ron instead of Cameron, and according to the online parenting club Bounty, one girl born last month was born Flicity.

And basic changes to spelling have led to numerous Samiuls (Samuel) and reports of 23 different versions of Isabelle or Isabella, ranging from Izzabella to Yzabel.”

The article raises a number of potential reasons for this uptick in these, um, original names, including the idea that parents believe they can give their child a better chance in life if they have a unique name.  However, the article also notes:

“Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at the University of California who has researched the impact of irregular names, found in that “less attractive characteristics were attributed to individuals with less conventionally spelled names”.  Professor Mehrabian said: “Unconventional spelling connoted less masculinity for men and less femininity for women [and] more anxiety and neuroticism were attributed to those with less common names.”

This sounds reasonable but I do think that the general shift in our approach to the written word is going to make these sorts of names both more common and thus more acceptable.  Like most trends today, it is only a matter of moments before they are co-opted by the entire society and lose any element of edge.

2 Comments

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  By lolis, April 7, 2008 @ 4:22 pm

  i hate this idea of abbreviating baby names for the sake of being different. it’s one thing when there’s an original idea that results in a unique name, but jumping on a bandwagon when naming your baby is a bit pathetic, no?

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  By baby boy, April 7, 2008 @ 9:00 pm

  I think giving a baby a original name will give him a hard time.I like not to common names but not bizarre names.

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