Dear Swistle,
I’ve enjoyed your blogs for years, though I’d never pictured myself needing to write to you for baby-naming help until my husband and I started talking more seriously about names when we found out we were pregnant with our first (and probably only) this fall. He had plenty of girl names that he loved, but exactly ZERO boy names that he even liked (he briefly considered the name Vaughn when he saw it somewhere, but that passed, and I wasn’t a fan), and none of the many boy names that I suggested sounded any good to him either. So when we had the option of finding out our baby’s sex when we did one of the non-invasive cell-free fetal DNA blood tests at 10 weeks we agreed we wanted to know so that we could either give up on looking at boy’s names or buckle down and find some. And we learned that we’re expecting a boy!
After a couple months of looking for new names and lobbying for ones that my husband initially shot down that I still like and think work well with our last name (Henry, Calvin, Paul, Peter, Ian, Lloyd, Grant), asking friends and family for fresh ideas, etc, I’ve found ONE new name that has caught our eyes: Asher. When I first found it on a list of names from the Bible (we’re not religious, but I know there are lots of names in there) I had no idea it had made lists of “top” or “most-searched” baby names recently (yours is the only baby-naming blog I follow, and I was never looking for a most-popular-type name so those were not the sort of lists I’d been searching for). When we realized we should pay more attention to the SSA’s list, we were both shocked to find out some of the names that we thought of as uncommon that are actually top-10 names right now, like Liam. We have a few friends with kids but most are child-free, so we don’t know a ton of babies right now, and we’re reluctant to ask our friends about how much they’re seeing the name Asher around here (Chicago area), as we’d like to keep the baby’s name under wraps until he’s born. We don’t want to pick a name that will be very popular very briefly and then sound very dated, so we wouldn’t want to use Asher if we find out in May that it skyrocketed to the Top 10 last year, but our son is due in June and I don’t want to be falling in love with this name for him for the next few months and then have to switch gears and scramble for another option a few weeks before he’s born, so I’d really like to have at least one more name on our list soon. I know you are not interested in trying to predict the future popularity of a name, but you’re so aware of trends and have seen how names on these most-searched lists have gone before, so I hope you could consider this opportunity to 1. address the trendiness of the name Asher and 2. help us find at least one more name that we somehow haven’t found yet.
My husband is David/Dave, I’m R3n3 (yes, with only one e after the n, my parents had no idea they were giving me a masculine name, it was the early 70’s and they thought they were being creative by putting one e at the end instead of two; they actually also put an apostrophe after the e on my birth certificate/Social Security card and my family continues to use the apostrophe to this day, though I dropped it in my 20’s). Because he has a common name, he’s turned off by names like Henry/Peter/Paul because he thinks of them as too common (I’ve pointed out that a kid named Paul today would never encounter as many Pauls as Dave (born in the early 70’s) encounters Daves; he also has another reason to not want Paul so it’s definitely out, but he still uses the too-common reason against Henry). Because I’ve had to deal with an uncommon, wrong-gender name, with an apostrophe at the end of it (and I won’t even get into the pairing of that with my very unusual and difficult to spell/pronounce Polish maiden name), I’m drawn to names that are easily recognizable as (in this case boy) names and have only one expected spelling. Asher is actually an outlier for me, but there is something about it that I am really liking, and it is the only name my husband likes (though he is also now on the fence about Calvin).
Our only other rules are that names that end in an s sound unfortunately don’t work with $utherl@and (ie Curtis, Felix), and all B names are out because of the initials BS. Ideally we wouldn’t use a name that starts with D or R, since we do like to use our initials, but as hard as it is to find a name at this point, that would not be a deal-breaker. Something about Calvin doesn’t sound perfect with the last name (maybe the EN/IN sound at the end with the AN sound in the last name?), the names that sound best to me have one or two syllables and totally different sounds from what’s in our last name, but at this point I’m trying to make as few rules as possible. We have no family names we want to use. I like John but we have too many adults in our life with that name, friends have used Jude and Oscar so those are out, other friends have chosen such unusual names that I’m not even worried you’ll suggest them. We’ll choose a middle name after we have a first name, might go with Michael (for a dear friend of mine who passed), but finding our kid a first name is our primary concern.
Thanks for reading, we’d really appreciate your and your readers’ help, and we promise to send an update with a photo as soon as the baby is born!
R.
Oh shoot, I just remembered one more rule is that the first name has to work with the last initial S. We ran into this with the name Levi, where the S forces you to think of the jeans– Levi S.
If I think to myself, “What are my impressions of the name Asher?,” here’s what I’ve got, in the order they come to mind:
1. A revived biblical name, along the lines of Ezra and Elias and Noah. Added benefit of not sounding particularly biblical, for those who would prefer to avoid that.
2. A “stealth popular” name: feels very unusual but there are a surprising number of them.
2b. But is #2 true, or is that something I read as a prediction? Because I don’t know any Ashers at all still. I asked the kids, and they don’t know any Ashers either. Maybe this was one of those names that created a lot of buzz but that’s all.
3. A next-generation name, as when we still like the sound of a name but it also feels dated or overused, so we try to find something that is similar yet different. Madison and Madelyn lead to Addison and Adalyn, for example; or, when Emma and Ella feel too popular, people look for other names starting with Em- and El-. I wonder if Asher came into fashion because we were not quite done with the name Ashley, combined with the celebrity of Ashton Kutcher, combined with the search for biblical revival names. It feels both fresh and familiar, a lovely combination; plus it has those long roots, so it isn’t an invented or overly modern name.
4. The -er ending makes it fit well with the surname style and the occupational-name style, both of which are in fashion now.
With a list like this, where I’d start is with 2b: IS Asher very popular? I feel like those “hottest search” lists can save parents from the mistaken impression that they are the only ones to think of the name, but they can also panic parents unnecessarily: the names people are interested in or want to talk about are not necessarily the names they use for their children. “Hotness” is difficult to translate into usage numbers. So, let’s look at the actual data for the name Asher:
(screen shot from SSA.gov)
The name was in very light, barely-Top-1000 use back in the 1880s and for one year in the 1890s (I haven’t included that part in the screen shot because that makes a lonnnng chart). The name then dropped out of the Top 1000 until it popped up again in 1983 and 1985; it came back and stayed back starting in 1992. Since then, you can see it has made significant progress up the chart—but not at a speed I’d describe as breakneck: it took more than two decades to go from virtually-unused to nicely-familiar.
I am always interested to see where a name STOPS. Many, many names come roaring into fashion, and that doesn’t scare me a bit: that’s how names WORK. We use one batch for awhile, and then a new batch becomes more appealing and we switch to those: I don’t even WANT to use a name that doesn’t sound nice to the current ear. But where the name STOPS is a very interesting and potentially important detail. A name might come into fashion and keep going until it gets to #1, as names such as Emma, Sophia, Isabella, Noah, and Jacob did, each at their own pace. Or a name might come into fashion and then hang around in the 100s or 200s ranks, where it is familiar but still unusual.
The name Asher has spent the last few years just sort of hovering: #113 in 2011, then #108 in 2012, then #104 in 2013. When the 2014 data comes out in May, I’ll be interested to see if it’s at, say, #106, or if it’s made the jump into the Top 100, or if it even ends up at, say, #128. I wouldn’t expect it to be in the Top 10.
One appealing feature of very old names is that it’s hard to apply the word “trendy” to them even if they become very popular, or even if they can be said to be part of a trend (such as the “hip biblical” trend). It’s similar to clothing fashions: even if navy blue blazers are considered particularly fresh and stylish one spring, and even if “nautical prep” is listed as a trend, it doesn’t feel quite right to use the word “trendy” for the blazer. For something to be trendy, there needs to be a flash-in-the-pan element, and that’s difficult to use when something has been in and out of the pan for thousands of years.
When parents have a too-long list and want to find ways to pare it down, I start looking harder at surname compatibility and the flow of the name. But when parents have a too-short list, I shift priorities. Calvin $utherl@nd sounds fine to me: I see what you mean about its possible imperfections, but I see the imperfections here as non-deal-breaking, and the name has so many things going for it that I’d keep it on the list.
Same with Felix and Curtis. I like names not to run together too much, but those don’t cross my “too much” line with $utherl@nd. One thing I look for is whether the run-together/blend matters at all. That is, are we talking the classic example of Ben Dover, where we really don’t want our child called Bend Over? Or is it more a case where two letters create a slight issue in the mouth when we transition from the one to the other, and it’s nothing embarrassing or upsetting? For me, Calvin, Felix, and Curtis all fall well within the second category with $utherl@nd: I’d be well willing to accept the minor imperfections (if they even ARE imperfections).
Here is an exercise I found exceedingly helpful. Do you have any yearbooks lying around? (I choose yearbooks rather than, say, the credits at the end of a movie, because I find the photos make things even clearer for me; but if you don’t have a yearbook, film credits or phone books or employee directories work well too.) If you do have a yearbook, page through one and look at the names. Notice how many of them are not perfect—and how little it matters in most cases. Once the name is attached to a person, most of them just seem like regular names, even if you can find things less than ideal about them. Jacob Butterfield kind of buh-buhs, I guess, but it just seems like a name. Evan Dylan is definitely one I could have advised against, and yet when it’s on a ninth grader it just doesn’t seem to matter very much. Calvin $utherl@nd and Felix $utherl@nd might not have even caught my eye with this exercise, let alone alarmed me or made me wonder what the parents were thinking.
I was already wondering if I should encourage your husband to reconsider Ian, and then I used the example of Evan Dylan in the previous paragraph; those two things together made me wonder if Evan might be a nice one to add to the list: it’s a little like Ian from your list, and a little like your husband’s former name-crush Vaughn, and a little like Calvin. Evan $utherl@nd.
Or Gavin. Gavin $utherl@nd.
I don’t suppose I could talk you into Harvey? I’ve loved it since Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Similar to Henry, but much less common. Harvey $utherl@nd.
I also suggest Karl. It’s a name I haven’t had much luck promoting, but I still think it’s worth a try. Karl $utherl@nd.
Name update!
Dear Swistle,
Thank you again for your and your readers’ help back in February when my husband and I were considering Asher for our son’s name. After several weeks of feeling like his name was going to either be Asher or Calvin, we both lost interest in both of those names, neither seemed right. So I started reintroducing names that I had liked but had been shot down early on, and this time the name Ev@n suddenly struck us both as just right. When looking for a middle name, it occurred to my husband that Ev@n had two letters from each of our names, so he used an anagram generator to see if there might be a middle name that used the rest too, and it turned out that we loved the middle name that we found for him that way. I’m pleased to report that two weeks ago we welcomed our dear Ev@n ®eed into the world!
