Baby Boy Tomlinson, Brother to Cyanna

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Hi Swistle!

I’ve been reading through your posts for a while since I named my daughter back in 2022, I enjoyed reading through all your posts. I was hoping you’d help my family out now we’re having our own name dilemma!
Well we’re now in July expecting a little boy into our family, little brother to Cyanna Scarlett. Our last name is very similar to Tomlinson. We’ve been on a total mess when trying to find boys names we both like and agree on! We adore Cy’s name! It feels like the perfect, pretty girls name. It has sweet nicknames and is such a happy name! However we can’t find any of the qualities we’re looking for in a boys name. We have agreed on a boys name we both liked but found that the automatic nickname would be ‘Kai’ and I’d definitely get mixed up having a Cy and Kai! This boys name was Makaio. I’ve been clueless for ideas, my husband’s favourite right now is Ziggy. But it just seems too happy and I’m not sure if it would really work on an adult. His middle name will most likely be August as we’ve decided we both like the name August, just not set on it as a first name!
If he were to have been a girl, he would have been Milani or Marsaili and in the case we have another baby and they are a girl then they will probably take either of these names! We’re not quite sure how many children we plan to have, but we will probably only have one more child if we were to have another at all!
Thank you so much for your time and consideration! We really do appreciate it.
Emi 💗

 

Oh, Makaio does seem perfect! The happy rhythm, the happy -o, the nickname potential! I wonder if you could call him Mack or Mackie instead. I wouldn’t have thought of Mackie except that a friend’s child goes by that, and now it sounds very natural to me. And maybe Cy and Kai WOULDN’T trip you up!

This is going to be a delightfully subjective category, and I am very much looking forward to the comments section, but in the meantime here are some more boy names that feel happy and/or fun to me:

Alfie
Angelo
Angus
Archie
Barnaby
Baxter
Brecken
Bridger
Briggs
Broderick
Crockett
Crosby
Darcy
Decker
Ezekiel/Zeke
Felix
Finnegan
Fletcher
Gideon
Hatcher
Jacoby
Jennings
Keaton
Keegan
Murphy
Padgett
Peregrine
Phineas
Quincy
Roderick
Roger (with the adorable nickname Hodge)
Rooney
Rufus
Shepherd/Shepard
Sullivan
Terrence

I would mention Kipling, but an earlier post has killed that name for me. I think Harvey would be terrific, but now Weinstein is back in the news again. And I would mention Indigo, but it seems like too much color with Cyanna and Scarlett—or is it? Would you want to make a full-on theme of it? Indigo Grey? Indigo Jet? But that would leave you with a difficult theme if you did have a third child.

Gus and Auggie both feel like a very happy nicknames to me, if it changes your mind at all about using the name August as a first name.

Baby Naming Issue: Choosing a New Name for a Transgender 5-Year-Old

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Hi Swistle!

I am a long-time reader, first-time name-help-seeker. We have two kids, @lice and H@rvey. My older child @lice is five years old and has been pretty insistent about not being a girl since age three. We have been following @lice’s lead and using she/her pronouns but always saying “kid” instead of “girl,” etc. It was never clear to me if @lice is trans or nonbinary or something else, but over the weekend he finally told us that he is a boy and wants to use he/him pronouns. I am fully supportive of this, although I am terrified given the political climate in our state and the fact that gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth has recently been completely outlawed. Buuuuut let’s ignore that for now and turn to the fun things: (non-)baby names!

I love the name @lice and am so very sad to see it (probably) go. I am not sure if @lice even knows that his first name is traditionally feminine, but we are going to have that conversation soon. If he were, say, a pre-teen, I would let him choose whatever he wanted as a new name (assuming he wants a new name), but I am somewhat worried that at this age we would end up with a preschooler named “Spiderman.” If he were assigned male at birth, he would have been H@rvey, although having two of them in our house seems needlessly confusing now.

What should we put on the short-list of options to present to him? Ideally I would like suggestions in the same style as @lice and H@rvey. Maybe keep the same first initial? Maybe not? His middle name is R@do (rhymes with Play-Doh), which is his late great-grandmother’s name but rare enough to pass as male or gender-neutral or whatever. I like Alex too, since it’s pretty close to @lice and adds an “X,” which is kind of fun. Something somewhat gender neutral might cover more bases as his identity evolves over time. Do you or your readers have any other suggestions?

Thanks!
J@k

 

I might offer him Al or Rado or A.R. or maybe Alex/Alix, to see if he wants to use any of those, and wait on any further re-namings until he is older and more able to lead/direct the process. In fact, my first thought was to continue calling him @lice for the time being, and follow his lead on the renaming as you have followed his lead on pronouns; but my second thought was that it does seem like it would be nice to get something less Girl in place before gradeschool begins, if only to reduce the amount of time you have to spend discussing it with people who don’t need to know, and aren’t even asking to know, but have merely tripped over the combination of a currently-used-for-girls name plus he/him pronouns.

I lean toward choosing a nickname that comes from his given names for now, rather than coming up with something new. This is, again, to follow his lead, and to avoid jumping the gun, and to reduce the total number of name changes. On the other hand, I admit it also appeals to me to think of temporarily/informally renaming him Ellis: very, very close in sound to @lice, yet worlds apart in style—and a nice fit with H@rvey. Alfie appeals similarly, though is a bigger jump in sound; very nice with H@rvey, though.

 

 

 

Name update:

Dear Swistle,

Thank you for publishing my letter. The help and encouragement from you and your readers was enormously reassuring and validating during a sort of difficult transition in my family. We broached the name subject at dinner one evening and suggested Al (a shortened version of my dad’s name too), Alex, and Rado. He immediately chose Rado and then said, “I’ll be the only ‘R’ in my class!” I have been surprised and delighted by how much confidence and just… a sense of right-ness with the world that the new name has brought him. Happy Mother’s Day to you and your readers, and thank you for being part of the village that supports me to be the best mom I can be for these lovely little creatures.

❤️ Jak

Baby Name to Discuss: Gemma

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What sister names would you suggest for a Gemma? The Baby Name Wizard says Zara, Chloe, Gillian, Felicity, Fiona, Isla. But I wouldn’t go with Chloe: too big a popularity gap. And I wouldn’t go with Gillian: it feels to me like a very different style. I think Felicity sounds too light and tripsy with Gemma: the contrast gives Gemma an unearned stodgy feel. I might think the same about Isla and its lack of strong consonants. I think Fiona works.

I’m undecided about Zara. It could be perfect: if Gemma was chosen because the parents like Emma but found it too popular, Zara could be considered the same sort of twist on Sarah.

One of the reasons I’m a little flummoxed by the name Gemma is that I haven’t encountered it enough to know how to hear it, or to know why parents choose it. IS it chosen as a less-common Emma? Is it chosen for its Italian roots or its English feel? Is it chosen because of the word “gem”—i.e., do parents use it the way they might use Pearl or Ruby or Jade or Jasper? I don’t know whether to put it with Bianca or Harriet, with Avalon or Olive, with Agatha or Adelyn or Audra.

Have you encountered the name Gemma more than I have, and have you had more of a chance to develop a feeling for its style and usage? I would be VERY INTERESTED to hear what you think. And especially I would be interested to hear if you already know of some sibling groups that contain a Gemma.

Did You Start Using a Different Name When You Moved / Went to College / Started a New Job?

40 Replies

Commenter ErinInSoCal had a good idea for a post. She commented on the post asking how much it bothers us to correct a mispronounced name, saying her daughter Beatrix is often called Beatrice, and her daughter’s nickname Bea (BEE-uh) is almost exclusively mispronounced Bee. Then she added:

Oh well, she’s turning 18 soon and going off to college, so she has the chance to reinvent her name if need be!

(Which, btw Swistle, could be another interesting thread — who started using a different version of their name when they moved/went to college/started a new job?)

 

Oh, I am SO interested to hear these stories. A friend’s daughter, named something along the lines of Haven Rose, started going by Rose as part of her new college experience. A co-worker mentioned that her Uncle Joseph is known to all his old childhood friends and most family members as Rusty—a nickname of his middle name, Russell, which he went by until he got his first job and thought he should use his first name to sound more professional.

Did you seize a life transition as an opportunity to make a name transition? Or has one of your children done so?

If You Have a Difficult-to-Pronounce Name, How Much Does it Bother You To Correct People?

65 Replies

Commenter Jaida had a fun idea for a post:

I wonder if Swistle has ever done a reader poll to see how many readers have difficult-to-pronounce names and how much it bothers them to have to correct people. It seems like something we all worry a lot about as namers but my own experience is that mispronunciation causes a brief moment of embarrassment/correction and then everyone moves on and there is one more person in the world that knows how to pronounce the name (no shade to anyone more affected by it, I just hope it doesn’t prevent someone from using a name they love!)

 

There are two separate baby-naming angles here: one is the tolerance parents have themselves for correcting/demonstrating the pronunciation of their child’s name, and the other is how people feel about needing to correct their own names. Both are good to consider when naming a child. If I, personally, am a parent who feels cheerful and relaxed about correcting a pronunciation a million times, that’s different than if I, personally, am a parent who clenches my teeth every time. If I clench my teeth every time, I should not do that to myself or to the world.

But it is also useful to get an idea for how the CHILD (and, of course, the resulting GROWN ADULT) feels about having such a name. It’s not something we can know ahead of time when naming our own personal child—but it seems like it would be useful to have a STATISTICAL feeling about it. That is, are 95% of people with constantly-correct-the-pronunciation names perfectly happy to do it, and only 5% clench their teeth? or is it the other way around? or is it something in between? I can’t do a poll, but I can ask for a voluntary anecdotal offering.

I have a not-very-difficult-to-pronounce name that is also common in my age group (Kristen), and it still gets mispronounced pretty often: I have learned to respond to Kristine, Kiersten, Kirsten. It is, to me, NOT EVEN REMOTELY a big enough issue to make me wish I’d been named something else—and, based on that experience, I’ve advised parents not to shy away from a name just because it might sometimes be mispronounced. But I had someone on my freshman year college dorm floor named Alysa, pronounced ah-LEE-sah, and 99% of the time she was called either ah-LISS-sah (by people who saw the name without hearing it) or Lisa (by people who heard the name without seeing it). Each time, she would close her eyes, as if praying for patience, and then say through clenched teeth: “It’s ah-LEE-sa.” At some point a name isn’t worth the daily lord-give-me-strength, either for the name-bearer or for anyone else.

So clearly there are going to be SWATHS of names here, from mispronounced-at-only-a-normal/tolerable level (like Kristen) to mispronounced-almost-all-the-time (like Alysa), and everything in between and outside, and I think we want to hear from them all. If you are a Lara and people call you Laura; if you are an Andrea and your parents wanted it pronounced on-DRAY-ah; if you are a Mia and people say MEE-ah and MY-ah; if you are a Kati and no one ever knows whether to say it like Katie or like KAH-tee; if you are a Salomé and sometimes people say suh-LOME; if your name is so unfamiliar, you’re accustomed to hearing “Uhhhh…” and knowing they mean you: How much does it bug you? how much does it affect your life? does it make you wish you were named something else, or is it just part of your name and you don’t mind?