{"id":13706,"date":"2018-08-27T08:18:24","date_gmt":"2018-08-27T12:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=13706"},"modified":"2018-08-27T08:18:24","modified_gmt":"2018-08-27T12:18:24","slug":"baby-boy-rhymes-with-suplurch-brother-to-eva-thor-or-george","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2018\/08\/27\/baby-boy-rhymes-with-suplurch-brother-to-eva-thor-or-george\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Boy Rhymes-with-Suplurch, Brother to Eva: Thor or George?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle,
\nWe are expecting a baby boy in 4-5 weeks and having real difficulty agreeing on a name for him.<\/p>\n

Our surname rhymes with Suplurch and we have a two year old daughter named Eva. She is named after my great grandmother. Her middle name is Lake and we love how the two sound together. We are very outdoorsy adventurous sporty people so it felt like a good fit.<\/p>\n

We have struggled much more with finding a boy\u2019s name this time around. Ever since we spent time in Iceland a few years ago, I\u2019ve loved the name Thor (in fact, I was considering the feminine version Thora for our daughter, but it was an outright veto from my husband). My husband is somewhat reluctantly considering Thor, but he prefers the very conventional name George. He has suggested calling our son George Thor but I prefer Thor George. While I don\u2019t love the name George, it is a family name, so I could live with it (but am really not sure I could do it as a first name).<\/p>\n

I really like less conventional names. And my husband likes more conventional names.<\/p>\n

I think he could be convinced to go with Thor but he is worried that in the USA, our son will always feel conflated with superhero movie Thor.<\/p>\n

My other top name pick is Tristan, but my husband says he hates the name (a surprise to me, because it\u2019s also the name of one of his closest friends).<\/p>\n

Do you think Thor is too difficult a name to use in the USA? And if so, can you suggest any other less than conventional names that we might both agree on? I should add that although we live in the US, we are English, so we want a name that can be pronounced in both countries and that isn\u2019t emphatically American.<\/p>\n

Thank you for your help!<\/p>\n

Best wishes<\/p>\n

Julia Suplurch<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

I do think Thor would be a challenging name for a child\/adult to carry in this society. I think the percentage of people who would think “Oh, yes, the Icelandic name \u00de\u00f3r!” would be vastly outweighed by the percentage of people who made the immediate association with the superhero\/deity. I think the jokes and references would be endless. I think if the child\/adult were the skinny intellectual non-athletic type, he might feel the contrast keenly—and that even a bulky athletic guy would get tired of it. Putting it through the “Would I want this name for myself?” test, for me it fails instantly and dramatically. If it were your husband who was rooting for the name Thor, I would suggest he try the Starbucks test: order a coffee and tell the barista his name is Thor, and see how that feels to say.<\/p>\n

With a sister named Eva, I’d be reluctant to suddenly go too unconventional—but on the other hand, it’s not uncommon for parents to have different tastes in boy names than in girl names. Still, my favorite would be to repeat what you did the first time: a more conventional name for the first name, ideally an honor name, and then something unconventional for the middle name.<\/p>\n

I think the right unconventional middle name can really perk up a more conventional first name, so if I were you I’d first make a little list of unconventional names you love, and then try out each more-conventional first name by combining it with those. Maybe you’re meh about George, but George Blaze or George Ranger or George Sterling is another story. If I were your husband, I’d get reallllllll flexible on middle names as a bargaining chip to get something more to his tastes as the first name. (And if the two of you end up going less-conventional for the first name, then I’d suggest letting your husband have a lot more say on the middle name.)<\/p>\n

I think it might also help to see if you can pin down what KIND of unconventional you’re looking for. Do you want an Icelandic name? Then I’d search some lists of Icelandic<\/a> names<\/a> and see if you can find something that would work well here: Arni, Jonas, Oskar, Otto, Stefan, Viktor. Do you actually kind of like the superhero\/deity thing? Then I would search lists<\/a> of god\/goddess names and\/or superhero\/comic names and see if you can find something that would work well here; I’ve seen Odin work on a real-life child. Does it just need to be less common? Then I would go to the Social Security database<\/a> and call up the Top 1000 names, and start looking at the bottom: Decker, Lyle, Ira, Leif, Alistair, Gibson. I’d also highly recommend the Exotic Traditional section of The Baby Name Wizard<\/a>: Aidric, Barnaby, Dashiell, Felix, Roman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle, We are expecting a baby boy in 4-5 weeks and having real difficulty agreeing on a name for him. Our surname rhymes with Suplurch and we have a two year old daughter named Eva. She is named after my great grandmother. Her middle name is Lake and we love how the two sound […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3z4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706","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=13706"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13713,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13706\/revisions\/13713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}