Shawn writes:<\/p>\n
I’m due with my first baby (a girl) today. Of course, it is 11:45 PM, so today is almost over. This baby could be here any minute! My husband and I have a name we both love… but I just realized an issue with the initials. Her last name will sound like Krawzik and we want to name her Finola Hazel. I love everything about the name Finola and Hazel is a family name. The problem is the initials. Can I give the baby the initials FHK? Does that look like I’m spelling something… inappropriate? One option would be to give her a different middle name, but we’re still left with FK when she’s writing her initials. Is this an issue I made up or is it a real problem? I LOVE the name, but I also don’t want my daughter to be teased. Please help!!!!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
If you had suddenly realized that her initials would be FCK, say, or FUK, I would spring into action to find a new middle name. But FHK doesn’t seem like enough of a problem to be worth the upheaval. Time is a factor here: it would take a lot for me to say that parents past the due date should start over on the name.<\/p>\n
FK would not perhaps be at the top of the list for ideal initials, but I’m not sure children’s initials come up very often. Two of my children have first\/last initials that form common and well-known abbreviations, but I asked them just now if anyone had ever pointed it out to them and both of them said no. (One added, as if helping me write the post, “I think it’s that my initials never come up—no one thinks about them.”) Teasing about initials such as FK requires a reach that seems fairly easy to respond to with eye-rolling scorn: “Yes, how clever of you to notice that two of my initials are also letters in a Naughty Word. *slow clap* Bravo, sir. Bravo.” Plus, a child making that connection would likely be in fairly serious trouble for bringing up That Word—or at least, that’s one of the areas where I notice my children are LIGHTNING-FAST with the shocked responses and tattling. (“A kid in my class? *thrilled\/horrified expression\/tone* Said ‘SUCKS’!!!!”)<\/p>\n
It will boil down to how important you think this is, and how possible it is at this point to do anything about it. Is it important enough for a huge last-minute scramble? Is it important enough to ditch the name you love everything about? (It sounds as if I expect the answer to those questions to be “no,” but I think it could go either way. If YES, we should immediately do a second post for new name candidates.) When you compare them, which WEIGHS more: your love of the name Finola, or your worry about the initials FK? Do you already have other names you love nearly as much as Finola, or would you have to start from scratch? Could you reverse the initials and name her Hazel Finola?<\/p>\n
This also seems like a good moment for the “What’s the worst that could happen?” game. The worst that could happen is that children in school could notice that her initials are FK, and could imagine that those two letters alone signified a swear word, and start teasing her about them. And then? Well, and then they would get in trouble for it, or else she would roll her eyes and they’d move on, or else they’d keep teasing her about it and eventually she’d be an adult and it would be all over—just as it would be for the classmate who got called Cooper Pooper, or the one who got called Isabellyfat, or the one who got called Two-by-Four because she was flat as a board. The nice thing about name-related teasing is that it’s harder to take personally than body-related or personality-related teasing.<\/p>\n
I’ve spent a few minutes mulling over how often I use my initials, and I do use them periodically (mostly on the kids’ homework, though also on bank forms and other occasional legal paperwork)—but I don’t remember my initials coming up very often back in elementary\/middle school days, and as an adult I wouldn’t expect initials like FK to be an issue. I found too that it helped when I wrote “FK” in cursive: they don’t look nearly as suggestive as they do in print—though if it were me, I would use FHK because I think those look even less suggestive.<\/p>\n
Let’s have a poll:<\/p>\n
[yop_poll id=”30″]<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shawn writes: I’m due with my first baby (a girl) today. Of course, it is 11:45 PM, so today is almost over. This baby could be here any minute! My husband and I have a name we both love… but I just realized an issue with the initials. Her last name will sound like Krawzik […]<\/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-8195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-28b","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195","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=8195"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8205,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8195\/revisions\/8205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}