{"id":13181,"date":"2018-01-17T11:22:54","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T15:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=13181"},"modified":"2020-10-15T14:18:07","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T18:18:07","slug":"middle-name-challenge-baby-boy-elliot-______-shw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2018\/01\/17\/middle-name-challenge-baby-boy-elliot-______-shw\/","title":{"rendered":"Middle Name Challenge: Baby Boy Elliot ______ Sh@w"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle!!<\/p>\n

I am so excited to finally be writing to you with an actual baby to name!! We are expecting our first (IVF!!) baby due in June, not finding out the gender. My name is Lindsay (spelled a different way), DH is Greg0ry, surname Sh@w. So here is my question… For a boy, we are 100% decided on Elliott for a first name. This is DH\u2019s middle name and a family name on his side and we have been talking about this name for so long that it really has grown on me and now I just think of our future son as this name. But because this name is so heavily influenced by DH\u2019s side of the family (the first name and the surname are all him), I want more say with the middle. I don\u2019t have family names that work.. the men in my family have Spanish names that I don\u2019t think fit with our naming style at all (same goes for my maiden name). So I am starting from scratch here. My naming style is \u201cpreppy-sounding\u201d if that\u2019s even a style.. And I want something definitively male to balance out Elliott which I know is becoming more unisex. I LOVE the way Alexander sounds… Elliott Alexander Sh@w just sounds meant to be. But I have a very close male friend with the first name Alexander\/Alex and do not want this to be perceived as me naming my child after him. Not that he isn\u2019t a great person but I feel like this would be inappropriate. I may be able to overlook it but for now I am searching for an alternative. So my question is… do you or your readers have middle name suggestions that flow as well as Alexander to go with Elliott? And that still carries that preppy sounding style? I don\u2019t want to inverse my husband\u2019s name and names I cannot use are Nathaniel, Benjamin, Michael, and anything with too much of an S sound because of the flow with Sh@w. Other names I\u2019m considering are Elliott Spencer Sh@w (but this has the S sound issue), or Elliott Oliver Shaw (DH not totally on board). Any suggestions??<\/p>\n

I might be writing back later with a girl name question but I\u2019ll stick with the one question for now! :) Thank you and I love reading your blog!<\/p>\n

Lindsay<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Here is a thing about honor names: it’s the exception and not the rule for them to match the parents’ naming style. The names of our relatives were chosen mostly by people with different naming styles than ours—and even the ones with a similar naming style chose names that are now out of date by a generation or more. This is why we recently had a whole huge crop of baby girls named after Great-Grandma Emma, but not a similar number named for all the Great-Grandma Ednas—even though there were approximately the same number of Great-Grandma Ednas as Great-Grandma Emmas. It isn’t that all the Great-Grandma Emmas were lovely and deserving of an honor-name tribute and the Great-Grandma Ednas were terrible and undeserving, it’s that the name Emma came into style and the name Edna didn’t. Parents accustomed to thinking, “Ug, I want to use honor names but all the people we love have such terrible names!” suddenly had a family name they actually wanted to use. It ought to be that the best way to have a lot of descendants named after you is to be a loving, kind, generous person, but the actual best way is to have a name that regularly comes back into style.<\/p>\n

All of this is to say that if you want an honor\/family name from your side of the family, and I agree that this situation fairly screams out for that, I think it would help tremendously to change the search from “family names that are my style” to “family members I love and want to honor in this way.” Especially since we are talking about a MIDDLE name. The middle name is the perfect place for names that represent our families and heritage rather than our personal naming style.<\/p>\n

But all naming choices are weighed on a scale, and it may be that when you put “honor\/family name” on one side and “naming style” on the other side, a name you really like is more important to you. In which case my favorite from your list is Spencer: I think the flow is great, I think it’s a great style match, and I don’t think that particular pair of S-sounds creates an issue.<\/p>\n

For something with some of the sound of Alexander, I suggest Elliott Anderson Sh@w.<\/p>\n

For more possibilities to consider, I leaned heavily on the Last Names First category of The Baby Name Wizard<\/a>: surname names often have that nice prep-school sound, and a lot of them have the -er ending of Alexander:<\/p>\n

Elliott Baker Sh@w
\nElliott Barton Sh@w
\nElliott Baxter Sh@w
\nElliott Bradley Sh@w
\nElliott Broderick Sh@w
\nElliott Carter Sh@w
\nElliott Chapman Sh@w
\nElliott Cooper Sh@w
\nElliott Deacon Sh@w
\nElliott Fletcher Sh@w
\nElliott Frederick Sh@w
\nElliott Gardner Sh@w
\nElliott Harrison Sh@w
\nElliott Hudson Sh@w
\nElliott Keaton Sh@w
\nElliott Mercer Sh@w
\nElliott Morrison Sh@w
\nElliott Nicholson Sh@w
\nElliott Parker Sh@w
\nElliott Porter Sh@w
\nElliott Redmond Sh@w
\nElliott Robinson Sh@w
\nElliott Sullivan Sh@w
\nElliott Theodore Sh@w
\nElliott Turner Sh@w
\nElliott Whitman Sh@w
\nElliott Wilson Sh@w<\/p>\n

In fact, one way to get a meaningful name that is also your own naming style would be to poke around in the surnames of people you admire. Favorite authors, actors, poets, politicians, activists, scientists, journalists, artists—do any of them have a surname with the right sound?<\/p>\n

One downside of surnames is that they are often unisex, and you’re looking for something definitively boy. The Social Security baby name site<\/a> is a good place to double-check usage. For example, the name Wilson is currently used exclusively for boys in the U.S., while the name Parker is currently unisex but used more often for boys (1470 new baby girls and 4685 new baby boys in 2016).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Hi Swistle!<\/p>\n

Our baby boy arrived June 6th! We named him Elliott Oliver Sh@w. Thank you to you and your readers for all your help deciding on a middle name for our little guy! His name suits him perfectly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Lyndsey Sh@w<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle!! I am so excited to finally be writing to you with an actual baby to name!! We are expecting our first (IVF!!) baby due in June, not finding out the gender. My name is Lindsay (spelled a different way), DH is Greg0ry, surname Sh@w. So here is my question… For a boy, we […]<\/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-13181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3qB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13181","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=13181"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14978,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13181\/revisions\/14978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}