Lara writes:<\/p>\n
Hi Swistle! Unless a miracle happens in the next few months, I’ll likely be writing for name help again, but as I was perusing my name list, I keep getting stuck on this issue, and thought it might be a quickie email that you could answer quickly and that others would find helpful.<\/p>\n
I really like both Elliott and Emmett for boys, but fear that they skew slightly feminine (girls! stop taking boy names!), though they stay firmly on my boy list for now. Where I COMPLETELY get stuck with these particular names is the nicknames. They’re multisyllabic names that seem to cry for a shortened version – but what?? Ellie and Emme are clearly out, since they are feminine nicknames, though they seem the most obvious. Elliott could, I suppose, use Eli – but is the “EH” to “EE” pronunciation change too much of a change? And with Emmett I’m completely stuck. Mett??? Metty??? Gross.<\/p>\n
So what do people use for nicknames for these boy names?<\/p>\n
Thanks!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
I would do no nicknames; I don’t think they need them. Especially Emmett—that’s only two syllables.<\/p>\n
The Elliott\/Eli connection doesn’t feel natural to me, though I know people do it. The letters are the same, but the sounds are completely different: not only eh to ee, but also ih to eye. When we shorten a name, it’s common to add a long-E sound to the end (Ellie, Emmie, Maddy), but not common at all to add a long-I sound. If Eli weren’t a name, I don’t think anyone would naturally start saying those sounds as a shortened version of Elliot—any more than we’d give a Madelyn a nickname that sounded like “Made-I.”<\/p>\n
Emmett so far is not skewing feminine at all: according to the Social Security Administration, in 2012 there were 2,007 new baby boys named Emmett, and only 10 girls. (For comparison, that same year 20 girls were named Matthew and 18 girls were named David.)<\/p>\n
Elliott is still mostly used for boys, but girls are indeed using it. Here are the 2012 numbers:<\/p>\n
Elliot: 307 girls, 1480 boys
\nElliott: 236 girls, 1252 boys
\nElliette: 96 girls
\nElliotte: 46 girls
\nEliot: 23 girls, 215 boys
\nEliott: 59 boys<\/p>\nYes, Ellie and Emmie definitely seem out to me, too. But I would just use the full names: neither Elliot nor Emmett seems too long to go without a nickname. There was an Elliot in my classroom back when I worked in a daycare, and it didn’t feel odd\/long to call him Elliot. But if you definitely wanted a nickname, you could use the initial, either alone (E.) or with a middle\/last initial (E.J., for example).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lara writes: Hi Swistle! Unless a miracle happens in the next few months, I’ll likely be writing for name help again, but as I was perusing my name list, I keep getting stuck on this issue, and thought it might be a quickie email that you could answer quickly and that others would find helpful. […]<\/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-7647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1Zl","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7647","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=7647"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7654,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7647\/revisions\/7654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}