{"id":15465,"date":"2021-06-13T10:02:59","date_gmt":"2021-06-13T14:02:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=15465"},"modified":"2021-06-13T10:06:39","modified_gmt":"2021-06-13T14:06:39","slug":"baby-girl-or-boy-rhymes-with-bay-if-boy-orion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2021\/06\/13\/baby-girl-or-boy-rhymes-with-bay-if-boy-orion\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Girl or Boy Rhymes-with-Bay: If Boy, Orion?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle community,<\/p>\n

Thanks for considering my question! I am particularly eager to hear your thoughts as I am a solo mama by choice. Thus I have both all the power and all the responsibility in naming this kiddo (due to arrive early July, sex unknown). I have thought a lot about names for a long time, but have kept my lists private during pregnancy (I didn’t want a name I ultimately loved to be colored by close family’s opinions) and have had a couple names rise to the top. However, I’m feeling a lot of uncertainty committing to my boy name without getting some outside input from some name nerds – I’d love to hear your thoughts!<\/p>\n

My last name is the month we are currently in (rhymes with “bay”) [note from Swistle: this email is from last month]. Given the shortness of my last name, I am very partial to a 3 syllable first name (that’s the case for my first name and I’ve liked it). For a girl I’m about 95% set on Josephine. Joseph is a family name and while I don’t want to have a “the third” for a boy, I do like this version as a girl’s name. I also really love that it gives the kiddo a lot of options in both length, style and “girliness” as they grow (Josephine, Josie, Jo, etc.). For middle names I’m considering Marion (a derivation of another family name) and Juniper (just love it, the sound, and the nature connotation).<\/p>\n

With all that context here is my real question\/conundrum. The boy name I’ve been holding on to all pregnancy is Orion. I like that it is short in letters, but has 3 syllables, I like that it is the constellation I can always find in the sky, and I think that it may be in that sweet spot of not too common, but also not too unique. But this is where I’m not sure –<\/p>\n

Concerns:<\/p>\n

1) will people hear it constantly as “ryan” leading the kid to have a lifetime of correction people,<\/p>\n

2) is it common enough that people will pronounce it correctly (rather than or-ee-on) (I live in New England if that matters).<\/p>\n

3) I like the nickname option Ori, however I am not Jewish and don’t want to appropriate<\/p>\n

4) I’m not too up on my Greek classics – but the story of the hunter Orion is…not the most positive.<\/p>\n

Most likely middle name is Thomas (a family name).<\/p>\n

Other boy names on my list:
\nFinnian or Finnigan<\/p>\n

Gideon<\/p>\n

Brendan<\/p>\n

Callum<\/p>\n

Solomon<\/p>\n

Theodore<\/p>\n

This is my first child. I am unsure if I will have another, so for now just want to go with what works for this kiddo.<\/p>\n

Thanks for your thoughts and perspectives on whether Orion will cause problems and whether there are other contenders I should be considering! For what it’s worth I have Irish heritage and am often drawn to that type of name (other than these of course).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oh! Coincidentally, I have light experience with TWO boys named Orion\/O’Ryan (one of each—and it’s interesting to me how two names pronounced the same can have such STRONGLY different style feelings): one was the younger sibling of a child we had some playdates with long ago, and the other was the son of a woman I worked with for awhile. So I can tell you what my own experience was.<\/p>\n

First issue: The first time I heard the name Orion\/O’Ryan in passing, I did mis-hear the name—not as Ryan, but just in a general not-being-able-to-catch-what-the-name-was kind of way. When I heard the name of the second Orion\/O’Ryan, my experience with the first Orion\/O’Ryan helped me hear it, and I only wondered if it were Orion or O’Ryan.<\/p>\n

Second issue: I’m interested to hear from commenters if anyone would have thought to pronounce it OR-ree-on: I’m so familiar with the pronunciation like the constellation that it took me a second to even understand how it could be pronounced another way. My guess is that this is a non-issue: that even if someone DID once in a while have a little neuron misfire and say OR-ree-on, it wouldn’t be often enough to be annoying.<\/p>\n

Third issue: I don’t know enough about this (particularly if it’s a nickname rather than the given name Ori<\/a>), and am hoping we have commenters who know more.<\/p>\n

Fourth issue: For those who need to brush up on Orion mythology<\/a>, two of his more famous attributes are (1) hunter and (2) rapist. The hunting thing will be highly subjective: some people see hunting as killing things for the cruel fun of it, others see it as participating in nature as God intended, and there’s pretty much every view in between. In Orion’s case, one of the stories of his death is that he was such an avid creature-killer that he had to be stopped by another deity before he killed all the animals on earth—so that doesn’t feel to me as if it falls into the “killing respectfully and gratefully and only when necessary for survival” type of hunting; it’s the “killing living things unnecessarily\/wastefully for fun and sport” type of hunting.<\/p>\n

The rape story is unfortunate; on the other hand, so many male deities have a story that involves rape. Not that that makes it better, but it’s not something that stands out as particular to Orion—er, not that that makes it better, either.<\/p>\n

And there’s one of Orion’s origin stories, which is that he was born because a bunch of male gods peed into a bull hide and buried it. My guess is that most people aren’t familiar with that story, but it’s common to do a mythology unit in school at some point, so there may be an uncomfortable few weeks. Still, speaking for myself, I was very keen on mythology in high school, and I didn’t remember this little tidbit at all. And when I encountered the two O’Ryans\/Orions in real life, the ONLY thing I thought of was the constellation.<\/p>\n

I wonder if you would like the name Oliver. Three syllables, only one more letter than Orion, and the nickname Ollie. More names that came to mind:<\/p>\n

Calvin
\nDarrien
\nDeclan
\nElliot
\nEverett
\nFrederick
\nNolan
\nSimon
\nSullivan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle community, Thanks for considering my question! I am particularly eager to hear your thoughts as I am a solo mama by choice. Thus I have both all the power and all the responsibility in naming this kiddo (due to arrive early July, sex unknown). I have thought a lot about names for a […]<\/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-15465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-41r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15465","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=15465"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15468,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15465\/revisions\/15468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}