New Year's Resolutions

A Christmas Song

Day One

Tummy Time with Noah & the Boys

Halloween, or TwinDaddioBlog

TV THOTS

What's It Like Being a Father?

The Name Game, Part 2

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Noah! This summer my wife and I are having twins. Someday, they will rule Poland.

I promised you I would say more about the process of baby naming. So it’s time for more on names.

Ahem.

Thank you.

Today I want to talk about sources, places to look for names for babies.

A great source for names, from a Western perspective, is the Bible. Good solid names that stand the test of time. People know them and they can spell them … sometimes.

Sidebar: When Michael Jackson died, practically every trending topic on Twitter was about him, including “Micheal Jackson,” spelled M-I-C-H-E-A-L. Yes, enough people were spelling the name wrong to make it a Trending Topic. Enough people cared enough about Michael Jackson to tweet about him, but didn’t know how to spell the name Michael, which is the most popular boy’s name of the last 20 years. Seriously America, there is a reason why this country is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the People’s Republic of China.

I like Bible names for, somewhat obvious reasons, though, when I tell people my name is Noah and my brother is named Abraham, they tend to assume we’re insane Biblethumpers who were home-schooled to believe that the one true path to heaven comes from eating buttermilk and barley sandwiches and shooting Mexicans on sight.

Yes, my brother is named Abraham. My mother’s father was the most lapsed of lapsed Jews, yet somehow he wound up with grandsons named Noah, Benjamin, Abraham, Samuel, Aaron, Daniel and Jeremiah. Conversely his granddaughters all have Jane Austen names Jane, Jessica, Emma, and Tessa.

Another good source for names is Shakespeare. Actually Shakespeare isn’t so great for boy’s names, since they either tend to be standard English names like John and Henry or impossibly fanciful fake Italian names like Prospero and Malvolio or dirty jokes like Falstaff and Pickledick.

There isn’t really any Shakespearean character named Pickledick, but there ought to be.

But Shakespeare is FULL of great girl’s names – Cordelia, Miranda, Viola, Rosalind, Cecily, Portia, Etcetera.

Etcetera isn’t the name of a Shakespearean woman, but it ought to be.

Then, of course, there’s family names. Now, for my own personal taste, I’m not a great fan of giving a child your own name, or that of any close relative who’s still alive. Actually, in the Jewish tradition it’s considered unlucky to name a child after a relative who’s still living. But if you go back a few generations on your family tree, you’ll probably find some good ones.

Of course, this gets into the problem of giving your child a name that seems like an old person name. But remember, these things are cyclical. In fifty years, everybody’s grandmother is going to be named Brittany or Tiffany. Does this mean all the little girls born in 2060 will be named Ethel and Prudence? I don’t know, maybe, but I could definitely see some old lady names like Rose or Clara come back. Remember that only a few years ago, Sophia was totally a grandma name, and now it’s the _________ most popular name for baby girls.

On the other hand, some old names are NEVER coming back into vogue. For example … Dorcas. Yes, that is a real name, a real woman’s name. It’s not a HAPPY woman’s name, of course. There’s a reason why the song doesn’t go “Who’s skipping down the streets of the city, smiling at everybody she sees? … Everyone knows it’s Dorcas.”

Still so much more to say about names. Do you have other good sources to find great baby names? Let me know.

Bye.

Screwing up Your Kids in the Best Way Possible

The Cat's Out of the Bag, Part 1

The Name Game, Part 1

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I’m Noah. This summer my wife and I are having twins … At this point we’re just signing our paychecks directly over to the Burbank Ikea.

To paraphrase comedian Mitch Hedberg, “If I had a baby I would have to think of a name. So I would need to buy a baby naming book or invite someone over who has a cast.”

Naming a baby is obviously a very important thing. It’s a key decision you make long, long before the child has any say in the matter

I feel like this must have been easier hundreds of years ago. Read a Shakespearean history sometime. Every character is named either John, Edward, Richard, or Henry, because those were the only names available.

Amanda grew up with a very common name. She was never the only Amanda in her class, and she didn’t like that. My parents gave me my own fairly uncommon first name to balance out my very common last name. The nice thing about my name is that everybody knows how to spell it and pronounce it, and they know where it comes from.

And yet, back in 1976 at least, it wasn’t very popular as a name. It’s gaining more popularity now, but I only knew a handful of other Noahs, growing up.

The less nice thing about my name is that I get to hear a lot of hilarious ark jokes. Well, not really hilarious, and not really jokes, plural. Just one joke, and it’s not even really a joke. It’s just “Hey, where’s your ark?” To which my usual answer is “I think I left it at your Mom’s house.”


I wonder, other people with Biblical names, do they get these same questions, too? “Hey, Adam, where’s your apple?” “Hey Mary, where’s your … virginity?” Though I suppose a good answer to that would also be “I think I left it at your mom’s house.”

Anyway, the point is, Amanda and I are trying hard to give our twins distinct names, but not bizarre names. We will not go the Hollywood route and name them, like, Effervescence and Ultra-Detective Atkinson.
Oh, yes, we have decided that our kids will have the last name Atkinson, rather than Smith because I don’t want to force anybody to have the name Smith and have to hear hilarious jokes from hotel clerks every time they check in.

For another, my father is the eldest of eight children and, in addition to my brother I have seven male cousins with the last name Smith. I’m not too worried about the family name dying out.

So, our criteria.

A) Distinct names, so they will not be one of a dozen Jennifers or Jasons in their classes. No offense to the Jennifers and Jasons of the world. I’m just saying your parents didn’t love you as much as we love our unborn twins.

B) Not too weird. I am a huge Marx Brothers fan. But I will not be naming a son Groucho Atkinson. I will not be naming a son Groucho Atkinson. I will not be naming a son Groucho Atkinson.

C) Something people can spell. When I was acting in children’s theatre, we would sign autographs for the kids at the end of the show and all the cute little quirky alternate spellings people were giving their children’s names were the bane of my existence. I think there are more ways to spell “Caitlin” than there are Eskimo words for snow. I wrote one children’s play with a character named Caitlin who spelled it Q-H-8-T-L-exclamation point-N-N-N. Audiences don’t always get that joke, but I appreciated it.

D) Something people can pronounce. There are a lot of lovely names out there that are just too tricky. I am one quarter Irish and I love Irish names. But when you look at how some of them are spelled versus how they’re pronounced … well, you can kind of see how the country’s reputation for drunkenness happened. If I name a kid Seamus or Siobhan, I’m dooming them to a lifetime of Seemus and See-oh-bann and I can’t do that to a child.

E) Something that goes well with the last name Atkinson. This rules out a lot of names that end in A sounds, because the first name and the last name would run together in a mushy way. For instance, my name would not go well with Atkinson. Noah Atkinson. That’s too many vowels in a row, when you say it, it’s like you started speaking Hawaiian for a few seconds. We’ve also had to rule out one of our favorite names, Atticus. Atticus Finch is a great character from To Kill a Mockingbird and it’s just a is a great name in general. But you can’t really name your son Atticus Atkinson unless you want him to grow up to be a Gilbert and Sullivan character.

I have a lot more to say about this, so this is really only part one of an ongoing series talking about names.

Please feel free to leave your own thoughts about this issue and I will happily steal them and pretend they’re my own.

Thanks. Bye.