Courtney writes:<\/p>\n
I really enjoy your site — baby names are a favorite topic of mine! I am the type of person who has had my favorite names chosen since about the age of sixteen. Until I married the love of my life…who happens to have a last name that semi-rhymes with my favorite girl’s name! I haven’t seen this topic tackled on your site, so I thought I’d give it a try.<\/p>\n
My name is Courtney, and my husband’s name is John. Our last name sounds like Divine (spelled with an ‘e’ in place of the ‘i.’) We will be trying to conceive in the next several months. If we have a boy, we’ll name him after my husband, whose middle name is Sharp (family name), and call him Jack. However, I am finding that our last name presents some challenges for a girl — only very classic names will go with ‘Divine’ in order to avoid the inevitable ‘that sounds like a stripper name!’ (and yes, I have gotten this quite a few times…) I do love classic names and think this best defines my naming style. I’m not afraid to take a bit of a risk but with our last name, it’s a bit difficult for me.<\/p>\n
My favorite girl’s name is Caroline. I absolutely love the name and haven’t found another name that equals it, in my mind. This might be a bit of a stretch, but I also feel that it combines our mothers’ names in a way — which are Karen and Linda. I love the name Karen, but it seems a bit too 1950s to use now. I love names that are traditional, slightly Southern, and very feminine. Vintage is ok — for example, I love a classic name that doesn’t go out of style, but consider a name like Evelyn a little too vintage for me. Catherine is similar and very pretty, but a very close friend just named her baby Catherine. I love the name Grace, but think it might be a little weird (overly religious sounding?) with Divine. I also like the name Claire, which my husband is just ok with. Another name I like is Jane (nn Janie). My husband does not love the vintage names — I haven’t come up with one that he loves yet. An example of a vintage style name that he’s not loving is the name Audrey. His style is a bit more contemporary than mine.<\/p>\n
Examples of middle names we could use are Lee (my original middle name and a favorite great aunt’s middle name), Shannon (my current middle name and my maiden name – I don’t care for it as a first name), Virginia (my grandmother’s middle name) and I have also thought about Allison, which is my sister’s name. Mary is also a family name we could use. I am Catholic, so I’d love to include a saint’s name if possible. Since we’d be naming a boy after my husband, we’re looking at my side of the family for a girl. :) John and I aren’t crazy about a lot of our family names, but it would be great to include an honor name of some sort.<\/p>\n
I guess my basic question is — is the name ‘Caroline Divine’ annoyingly singsong and rhymey? I love the name Caroline, and so does my husband. It actually is one of the only girl’s names that we’ve agreed upon! Half of me feels like the name sounds like a very sweet, cute girl. The other half says, ‘no one will take her seriously with a rhyming name like that.’ I’d hate to have her teased or pre-judged later in life because of her rhyming name, just because I liked the name so much or couldn’t get on board with something else!<\/p>\n
When I’ve asked friends and family, they are about 50-50 on whether or not to use it. What is your opinion? Is Caroline Divine too much? If so, can you recommend some other choices?<\/p>\n
Thanks so much!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
I have gone back and forth on this for four days now. Sometimes when I say “Caroline Divine,” I think it’s striking and memorable and fine. Other times I think that there are very few rhyming names that don’t sound like stage names: I find myself saying “Caroline…the DIVINE!!” in a circus announcer tone of voice. I think too that it could increase pronunciation issues: if I saw the name Caroline Divine, my first pronunciation attempt would be CaroLYN, because I’d feel silly if I guessed a rhyme where there wasn’t one.<\/p>\n
The happy thing, though, is that the adjective divine is a very, very positive one. I can picture people saying, “It’s Caroline….THE DIVINE!!” or “Divine Caroline” pretty often, and I can picture that getting tiresome—but it’s a very different kind of tiresome than “Luke the Puke” or “Cooper-Cooper-Pooper-Scooper.”<\/p>\n
I wonder if you’d like Karenna as an updated Karen? Karenna Lin or Karenna Lindy or Karenna Linda would be a pretty way to honor the grandmothers.<\/p>\n
Or I wonder if you’d like Josephine: similar in look and style to Caroline, but a non-rhyming ending. A saint name, too.<\/p>\n
Another saint option is Genevieve.<\/p>\n
Or Winifred.<\/p>\n
Margaret Mary Divine is pretty, or Margaret Shannon Divine, or Margaret Courtney Divine.<\/p>\n
If you decide not to use Caroline as the first name, I think it would be nice as the middle name: the rhyme would be so much less of an issue there.<\/p>\n
Let’s have a poll to see what everyone else thinks about Caroline Divine:<\/p>\n
[yop_poll id=”42″]<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Courtney writes: I really enjoy your site — baby names are a favorite topic of mine! I am the type of person who has had my favorite names chosen since about the age of sixteen. Until I married the love of my life…who happens to have a last name that semi-rhymes with my favorite girl’s […]<\/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-8460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2cs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8460","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=8460"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8461,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8460\/revisions\/8461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}