{"id":14775,"date":"2020-05-29T10:56:17","date_gmt":"2020-05-29T14:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=14775"},"modified":"2020-05-29T13:02:38","modified_gmt":"2020-05-29T17:02:38","slug":"baby-girl-cox-sister-to-raven","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2020\/05\/29\/baby-girl-cox-sister-to-raven\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Girl Cox, Sister to Raven"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hey! We are having such a hard time this time around finding a baby name we all like! I’m due September 20th, she’s a girl and we love the name Aurora Paige but our family isn’t too keen on it\ud83d\ude02. We are trying to stay with mythological names since our first daughter is named Raven Elizabeth and it’s a mythological name! Our last name is Cox and my husband always says as long as they can’t make fun of her name when she’s older then he’s good with whatever but the problem is he can make a joke out of anything I pick! He liked Christina Paige but I am not in love with that name at all! This is our last baby so we really want a name we love! We are open to a variety as long as it’s Mythological and we can pronounce it \ud83d\ude02 all of this may be shared! Can’t wait to see what you come up with\ud83d\ude0d<\/p>\n

Thank you,<\/p>\n

Jacqueline Cox<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Won’t it be lovely when we’ve evolved as a society to the stage where it is equally common to use the family name of either parent? It will be too late to save my former classmates Amy Dick and Michael Butt (first names changed, surnames real), but just think of the countless future generations who will be spared. So many surnames are being passed along instead of passed over, to everyone’s loss. Cox is not the worst of them, but it is causing unnecessary problems nevertheless.<\/p>\n

And if the surname I see in your email address is your maiden name, then there was a elegant, beautiful, easy-to-work-with, particularly-lovely-with-mythological-first-names surname that could equally legitimately have been chosen for these children, and their father would not have been able to come up with a joke about any first name you picked. But no, we have to work with Cox, because that’s the father’s surname and father surnames are still chosen a vast majority of the time.<\/p>\n

Fine. Fine! We will work with reality as we find it.<\/p>\n

I think you should choose Aurora. You both love it, you agree on it, it meets your preferences, and your husband has not found a way to make a joke about it with the surname. Your families not being too keen on it is not a good enough reason to find something else: it is so common for members of the extended family to be Not Keen On a name they hear before the birth, but to be completely in love with it when it is announced to them alongside the newborn’s tiny beloved face. It’s hard enough to get two parents to agree on a name, without trying to get extended family agreement as well.<\/p>\n

If, however, they have a more legitimate reason to object to the name than just not being keen on it (if, say, they have raised the issue that it is the same as the name of someone who stole your family’s fortune and ran off with its patriarch), or if their non-keenness has already ruined the name for you, let’s see if we can find more options to consider.<\/p>\n

I am pulling this list from the Mythological section of The Baby Name Wizard<\/a> (and thanks to the readers who let me know there was a 2018 fourth edition I’d somehow missed the release of). It’s a little tricky, because a lot of the names I would normally want to suggest from this list (Ariadne, Persephone, Minerva) feel too long and feminine and traditional with the sister-name Raven. But let’s see what might work, and I’ll include the ones that might be too much of a style shift, just in case (except Minerva, which bothered me by containing all the letters of the name Raven AND having unfortunate nickname potential with Minnie-which-sounds-like-Mini):<\/p>\n

Aeron
\nAriadne
\nAthena
\nCalliope
\nDaphne
\nFreya
\nIris
\nLavinia
\nLilith
\nLorelei
\nMelia
\nMorrigan
\nNiamh
\nPenelope
\nPersephone
\nPhaedra
\nPhoebe
\nSelene
\nSilvia
\nThalia
\nTheia<\/p>\n

Morrigan stands out to me from this list. It has a cool-and-somewhat-unisex sound similar to Raven, and I’m not seeing any issues with the surname. I would also lean toward Niahm (pronounced Neeve) if I didn’t think the spelling was more than I personally would want to take on. I don’t know if spelling it Neeve would give you the same mythological feeling, though.<\/p>\n

(I would very much appreciate double-checking on surname issues, including with potential nicknames. I am remembering when a letter-writer with the same surname wrote in and mentioned that she wanted to avoid issues such as Mike Cox, and it took me longer than you might think to realize that the issue was that the name Mike would slide into sounding like My. But on the other hand, it’s hard to tell if I’m overthinking it: if Ariadne goes by Ari, pronounced like Airy, is that a problem with the surname? or is that kind of thing just the unavoidable “EVERYTHING can be a joke” issue that goes along with having the surname Cox?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hey! We are having such a hard time this time around finding a baby name we all like! I’m due September 20th, she’s a girl and we love the name Aurora Paige but our family isn’t too keen on it\ud83d\ude02. We are trying to stay with mythological names since our first daughter is named Raven […]<\/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-14775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-3Qj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14775","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=14775"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14780,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14775\/revisions\/14780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}