{"id":10342,"date":"2014-08-07T07:06:10","date_gmt":"2014-08-07T11:06:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=10342"},"modified":"2019-04-09T07:46:06","modified_gmt":"2019-04-09T11:46:06","slug":"baby-girl-or-boy-jorge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/08\/07\/baby-girl-or-boy-jorge\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Girl or Boy Jorge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle,<\/p>\n

We are expecting our first baby (gender unknown) next year. Our surname is Jorge (pronounced like the Western version, or the royal baby’s name).<\/p>\n

We have our girl’s name chosen and locked in – it was a very easy decision. It will be “Eva.” Partially because we like the sweet, classic simplicity; and partially because it is a name found in my family a handful of generations back. If we have a boy now, and our second child is a girl, the name will still be “Eva.” We are unlikely to have a third child at this stage.<\/p>\n

Boy’s names are much more difficult for us, and we are at a standstill. I have a few names I like, but my husband isn’t really “into” any of them – and he doesn’t really have any suggestions of his own. Some contenders (at least on my end!) are:<\/p>\n

Alistair (my absolute favourite)
\nToby\/Tobias
\nLucas
\nLaurence
\nRory
\nBlythe
\nArthur
\nHenry
\nSebastian<\/p>\n

We are looking at middle names that begin with ‘R’, to continue an ongoing prevalence of ‘R’ names in both his and my families.<\/p>\n

He doesn’t mind “Arthur”, and neither do I. It’s a family name; my great-grandfather, whom I knew and loved, was called Arthur, and it would be lovely to offer a tribute to him. Whilst I can see it being a cute name for a little boy, and old-fashioned names are making a come-back, I can’t decide whether it is a difficult name for a child, a teenager or a grown man to carry in this day and age. Do you think it is flexible enough to work, or still too borderline?<\/p>\n

I also love the name “Blythe” (having been a life-long fan of Anne of Green Gables and therefore “Gilbert Blythe”) but I am told it’s more of a girl’s name now. This puzzles me, as I don’t know any girls with this name, and it sounds like a masculine name to me. Is it really a name most commonly associated with girls? Or is it still a unisex name?<\/p>\n

Can you help us with any suggestions for our conundrum? We have trawled through baby name books and have found very few names that appeal to us.<\/p>\n

Thank you!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I don’t think I know anyone named Arthur (other than PBS’s cartoon aardvark), which makes it hard to judge. But my immediate impression was positive. If I encountered it on a child, I think I’d find it an appealing and surprising choice, along the lines of Alan or Warren, but with a hint of the romance of King Arthur. I would definitely expect it to age well, and in fact I would think the concern would be something more like “We think this works great on a man, but does it work on a little boy?” (To which I’d say “Yes!”)<\/p>\n

I was startled by the idea of Blythe for a boy: it was Gilbert Blythe’s surname, but as far as I knew it had only ever been used as a first name for girls—as in, not that it has come to be used mostly for girls, but that it had never been used for boys. I looked it up in The Oxford Dictionary of First Names<\/a>, which says only that it’s a modern name from the word blithe; they have it listed as a girl’s name. I was not sure what a book like the Oxford Dictionary would consider “modern,” so I started looking through the Social Security Administration’s data base.<\/p>\n

The name Blythe has never been in the Top 1000 for either boys or girls. Using their “Beyond the Top 1000” documents, I started way back at 1880 (the first year of the data bases): no Blythes, either male or female. I skipped to 1900: no Blythes. In 1904, we see it: 6 new baby girls named Blythe. But then no Blythes in the data base for 1905-1911 (which doesn’t mean there were none, just that there were fewer than 5). Now we’ve hit Gilbert Blythe territory: Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908. In 1912, there are 5 new baby girls named Blythe; none in 1913-1914. In 1915, there were 11 new baby girls and 5 new baby boys named Blythe; none in 1916. In 1917, 10 new baby girls and 5 new baby boys. Let’s start going by five-year increments now:<\/p>\n

1920: – F, – M
\n1925: – F, – M
\n1930: 7 F, – M
\n1935: 11 F, – M
\n1940: 8 F, – M
\n1945: 8 F, 5 M
\n1950: 22 F, – M
\n1955: 16 F, – M
\n1960: 22 F, – M
\n1965: 26 F, – M
\n1970: 50 F, – M
\n1975: 66 F, – M
\n1980: 47 F, – M
\n1985: 84 F, – M
\n1990: 73 F, 5 M
\n1995: 46 F, 5 M
\n2000: 60 F, 11 M
\n2005: 79 F, 8 M
\n2010: 85 F, 5 M<\/p>\n

And in 2013, the most recent data: 172 F, 7 M.<\/p>\n

I’m a little suspicious of the accuracy of the data, especially in the earlier years: in 1935, for example, there were 41 new baby boys named Elizabeth, 72 named Margaret, and 276 named Mary; were there really, or are these entry errors? But we can see it appears there has been some very light usage of Blythe as a boy’s name, though overall it has been used for girls; it has always been a very unusual name.<\/p>\n

I am intrigued instead by the possibility of Gilbert. Most of the -bert names are out of fashion right now, but I would not be surprised to see them coming back in. The Anne of Green Gables association is quite a positive one, giving the name an extra boost of likeability. Gilbert Jorge.<\/p>\n

Rory Jorge has a little too much “or” sound for my own tastes, but I like it as a middle name possibility. There are tons of other good R names, too: Robert, Russell, Ryan, Rufus, Riley, Rhys, Reid\/Reed, Reuben, Roland.<\/p>\n

I think the next step is for your husband to go through a name book and make his own list. It’s hard to make progress if he’s saying “eh” about your choices but doesn’t have any counter-offers. If he made his list and it were, for example, Cody and Rylan (or Eric and Brian, or Max and Jack, or Stanton and Hollis), we’d know what we were dealing with and could start making some middle-ground suggestions.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Name update:<\/strong><\/p>\n

We went on to have our little girl – Ev@. Thank you again for your suggestions!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle, We are expecting our first baby (gender unknown) next year. Our surname is Jorge (pronounced like the Western version, or the royal baby’s name). We have our girl’s name chosen and locked in – it was a very easy decision. It will be “Eva.” Partially because we like the sweet, classic simplicity; and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2GO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10342"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14107,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10342\/revisions\/14107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}