Update (and photo!) on Baby Naming Issue: If You Promised Not to Use an Honor Name, Do You Have to Keep that Promise?

Update on Baby Boy Angle-with-an-E!

Update on Baby Naming Issue: Is Dash Too Much Like DAESH?

Update on Baby Name to Consider: Ruby Rose Winter!

I would like to talk a little bit about two topics that come up fairly often in the comments section, and which I think are somewhat related. The first topic is whether or not any particular letter is real, and the second is the rate at which our advice is taken.

There are certain posts which can cause the reader to think, “Wait. Can this be real?” When I am going through the letters and deciding which ones to answer, this frequently catches my attention too. Sometimes it is the circumstance that seems unlikely; sometimes there is something that just seems off about the tone of whole thing. (Sometimes this tone can come from the writer trying to protect identifying details.) Other times, nothing in a letter catches my attention—but months later I will get another letter from the same email address, describing a completely different situation with different sibling names, and I will realize one or the other or both letters were fake.

You may well wonder if this bothers me, and there are times when it does: no one likes to feel foolish, and spending time sincerely answering a totally fake letter could potentially make me feel fooled, and therefore foolish. It generally doesn’t, however, and this brings me to the second topic. We’ll need to take a bit of a leap to get there, but stay with me and I will tie it all up together.

It is common for a commenter to get discouraged, when we get update after update where the letter-writer has asked for our advice and then seems to have decided not to take it. You might think this would be discouraging to me as well, and yet with very few exceptions it isn’t. This is for many reasons, from “feeling that sometimes the benefit of advice is that it reinforces the opposite opinion” to “feeling that sometimes the real benefit comes from seeing a variety of viewpoints” to “we NEVER all agree, and the letter-writer can’t take EVERYONE’S contradictory advice.” But another large part is because awhile back, when thinking about why it was that I loved writing here but didn’t like doing private consultations, I realized that although this blog APPEARS to be written for the benefit of the letter-writers, it is ACTUALLY written almost solely for the benefit of those of us who like to talk about baby names. The whole point of the blog was that I wanted to talk/think about baby names MUCH MORE than I had babies to name, so I wanted a place where I could spend time with other people who felt the same way.

I assume we DO all hope our discussions will help the letter-writers (and other parents experiencing similar problems)—but the real, true, deep-down purpose of each letter is to be a jumping-off place for OUR discussion. This is why I don’t mind taking a letter from someone who has a hypothetical question over a letter from someone in labor: because it is not really ABOUT how badly the letter-writer needs us, it is about how much we want to discuss the topic. There are days I cannot face explaining EVER AGAIN about how the #1 name of today is not of comparable popularity to the name Jennifer in the 1970s, and yet I would LOVE to talk about a dilemma I haven’t considered before, sent by someone who is not even pregnant yet.

Clearly, this is not something I want at the forefront of everyone’s mind all the time. It feels happier and more purposeful all around if the overall feeling is that the letter-writers need help, and we provide help. And yet I think it is happier and more satisfying and less discouraging in the long run to realize that is not the real story.

For one thing, it takes away the discouraged feeling when letter-writers decide against even near-unanimous advice. Even if no one EVER took our advice, WE still had the fun of discussing the topic and maybe continuing to think about it while doing boring chores, and also the fun of getting peeks into other people’s lives and situations and naming preferences/styles. (And this is why I hope letter-writers won’t feel shy about updating us, even if they decided to go a different way: I care very much about knowing the outcome, and little to nothing about whether it’s the same outcome I voted for.)

For another thing, it takes away the need to determine if a particular letter is really truly real before posting/discussing it. Not only would this be almost impossible to verify anyway, it does not matter: all WE wanted was the fun of discussing baby names, and we GOT that. If the letter-writer is someone not actually experiencing the described situation, they have gained nothing from our reply, and we have lost nothing—and we have still gained the fun of discussing the situation; and other parents in similar-but-actually-real situations have still gained the benefit of reading about it.

Second and third updates on Baby Naming Issue: Three Pregnant Sisters All Want to Use the Same Name!

Update (and photo!) on Baby Boy or Girl, Sibling to Esmé and Oliver!

Update (and photo!) on Baby Name to Consider: Ferris!

FIRST update on Baby Naming Issue: Three Pregnant Sisters All Want to Use the Same Name!