Josie writes:<\/p>\n
We’re having a baby girl and we’re going to name her Samantha. Now the middle name is giving us pause. I’ve loved the name Faith, but alas it is my husband’s sister’s name, and his family is Jewish so they won’t name after living relatives. So then we moved on to a name with similar meaning — which is why I’ve loved it so — and wound up with Hope.<\/p>\n
Perhaps you see where this is going. We forgot about Obama. I don’t think I have it in me to name my daughter after a presidential campaign, because what if Obama is a flop? What if he sucks? What if we look like cliche liberal assholes?<\/p>\n
Is there any resource that will show similar meaning names? Because really, Samantha Hope? Oh good heavens. How do I explain that one? Oh HAI. AM LOONY DEMOCRAT WHO MIGHT AS WELL NAME HER DAUGHTER MICHELLE OBAMA.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I spent some time searching online for a similar-meaning-names resource. What I found was a lot of really unpleasant, flashing-ad-ridden baby name sites. The only grain I found in all the chaff was the name Nadia, which evidently means hope. That’s it. It’s Nadia or it’s Itxaro, apparently. And Samantha Nadia, while fine, doesn’t have the ring of Samantha Faith or Samantha Hope.<\/p>\n
I have another suggestion, however. What about Joy? Samantha Joy. It’s beautiful, it’s meaningful, and it has the same rhythm as Samantha Faith or Samantha Hope. But is that a problem because it shares your initial?<\/p>\n
And I have one more suggestion: use Samantha Hope. I wouldn’t have made the association myself, I think because the name Hope is so established already as a girl’s name. It isn’t as if you’re using Samantha Yeswecan or Samantha Maverick. My opinion, in fact, is that this is a non-issue: that you can freely use the middle name Hope without anyone associating it with politics.<\/p>\n
But this is the kind of opinion that begs for a larger-sample-size survey. What do the rest of you think? If you heard of a baby girl named Samantha Hope, would you associate it with the new U.S. president? Vote in the poll to the right. [Poll closed; see below.]<\/p>\n
[Poll results<\/span> (292 votes total) for “Does the name Hope have political associations for you?”<\/p>\n
Yes: 15 votes, roughly 5%
No: 224 votes, roughly 77%
What are you talking about?: 53 votes, roughly 18%]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Josie writes: We’re having a baby girl and we’re going to name her Samantha. Now the middle name is giving us pause. I’ve loved the name Faith, but alas it is my husband’s sister’s name, and his family is Jewish so they won’t name after living relatives. So then we moved on to a name […]<\/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-7132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1R2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132","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=7132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}