Shannon writes:<\/p>\n
As someone who loves thinking and talking about baby names, I’ve been reading your site since long before I found out I was pregnant. I’m now due with our first child in a bit more than two months and we will not find out the baby’s sex before the birth. We settled on our most likely girl’s name without much trouble, but I’m really wrestling with a few issues associated with our top boy’s pick. Our current plan is for this baby (and the second child we hope for) to have two middle names, with my last name, which sounds like Scoreless with a C as the second one. The baby’s last name will be the same as my husband’s, which sounds like Diner but with a W (so, FirstName MiddleName Scoreless Diner). This means any full name will probably be a bit of a mouthful, but given what I imagine will be the infrequent verbalization of the full name, I’m not terribly concerned about it.<\/p>\n
Though I’m convinced this baby will be a boy, should she turn out to be a girl we will likely use the first and middle names Delia Harlow. Both are family names on my side, and though I sort of wish Harlow weren’t climbing the charts so rapidly, I really like it in combination with Delia.<\/p>\n
We run into a great deal more trouble when we get to names for a possible boy. Our top pick at the moment is Alden, and I have two main concerns:<\/p>\n
1. It is but one letter away from the very popular Aiden. When said aloud I don’t imagine the two will get confused, but how likely is it that when written it will get mistaken for Aiden and [mis]corrected?<\/p>\n
2. Ideally we’re looking for a name that is [relatively] uncommon, timeless (I want a name that was a name 100 years ago), and that will age well. In your opinion does Alden, given its “den” ending, fall into the large group of currently very popular\/trendy boy’s names? I’d like to avoid someone in 30-40 years seeing his name and knowing immediately in what decade he was born.<\/p>\n
Our other top option at the moment is Asa, which is another family name on my side. My concerns about Alden are not an issue here, but I’m having difficulty getting past the way it sounds with the baby’s last name. Though my husband is in fact Jewish by birth he’s far removed from that identity in his daily life, and he himself has a much more Christian-sounding first name. I wonder – and I am trying to say this as delicately as possible because it’s not an actual problem – about the ramifications of a child having a combination of names that sound (to my ear) very Jewish. Am I overthinking this? Does Asa again have secular connotations now the way it did 100 and 200 years ago?<\/p>\n
Top middle name contenders are Barrett (for Alden) or Sullivan (for Asa). Other names we both like for the middle slot (but that don’t seem to work as well as the two I’ve just mentioned) are: Hayes, Heath, Holden, Penn and Flynn.<\/p>\n
(Related question: does one of the two possible boy’s names sound like a better sibling name for a Delia?)<\/p>\n
I really appreciate any opinions you and your readers are able to offer. My husband is of the opinion I’m overthinking all of this, which is entirely possible :)
\nThanks in advance!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/p>\n
When I first read through your question, I read the first mention of Alden as Aiden. When I got to the part that said it was only one letter away from Aiden, I thought at first that the question was about Aidan vs. Aiden. I went back to the first mention of the name, and only then did I realize it was Alden. This is not a promising start, but was an excellent and vivid demonstration of the issue you’re describing.<\/p>\n
My guess is that the huge popularity of Aidan\/Aiden and the relatively low usage of Alden will indeed mean that Alden will frequently be mistaken for Aiden. I think it will be part of the package deal of the name: just as an Annabel needs to keep saying it’s two N’s and it’s -bel not -belle or -bella, and just as an Aidan needs to keep saying it’s -an not -en and Aidan not Hayden, an Alden will have to deal with people saying\/writing Aiden. This doesn’t rule it out, any more than it rules out the names Annabel and Aidan. But it’s something that is good to think of ahead of time: every name has its downsides, and some of them will drive you more crazy than others.<\/p>\n
I think the name may also be confused with Alton: celebrity chef Alton Brown was my first association with Alden, even though it’s not the same name. Using Alton instead of Alden might eliminate or reduce the Aiden confusion.<\/p>\n
The -den ending doesn’t make it seem modern or trendy to me. The group of names I suspect you’re referring to is the -ayden names (Aidan, Braden, Caden, Grayden, Hayden, Jayden, etc.), and I think the long-A is important to being included in the group. Without the long-A, what we have is the category of -en names: popular, but such a broad category that they’re not as noticeable as a group. Not as dated, either: the -en category includes names such as Kristen and Jason from the 1970s, Susan and Karen from the 1950s, Stephen and Calvin from any old time, and Mason and Madison from the current top ten.<\/p>\n
This doesn’t mean Alden couldn’t suddenly get more trendy\/modern. Names such as Holden, Landon, and Camden are in style, and could become even more popular with time. In this case, however, I think they help the name Alden feel more usable and familiar. Also, the name Alden has been drifting in and out of the Top 1000 for centuries without ever getting higher than #427, while Camden and Holden are new to the list and rising rapidly.<\/p>\n
My primary association with the name Asa is Asa Buchanan on the soap opera One Life to Live. I watched soap operas for only a brief time in my life (one college roommate watched them), and yet the association stuck.<\/p>\n
The name Asa sounds completely secular to me: I wouldn’t make any religious assumptions about the family, any more than I do when I hear the name Noah.<\/p>\n
If you would like my own personal opinion, I prefer the name Alden. It does have the Aiden issue, but when I look at the package deals, I prefer the package deal of Alden to the package deal of Asa. I also prefer the name Alden with the surname, and with Delia: I would prefer to avoid the repeated -a ending of Asa and Delia.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Name update!<\/strong><\/p>\n
Hi Swistle,<\/p>\n
This naming update is terribly overdue and I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get back in touch. In the end, our daughter (daughter!) was born at the end of April. No one was more surprised than me (both by her sex, and the fact she arrived a few weeks early), and though some your commenters warned against it, we did in fact go with our first choice name pick for a girl: first name Delia, middle name Harlow, and are completely happy with our choice. I so appreciated the feedback on our potential boy names, though – especially the near-unaminous call to avoid Asa with our last name. Somehow the pitfalls of that combination hadn’t occurred to me, and it is now officially off the list should we be contemplating boy names at some point in the future. Thank goodness for such astute readers\/commenters! Thanks again for posting my question, and for your help.<\/p>\n
Best,
\nShannon<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shannon writes: As someone who loves thinking and talking about baby names, I’ve been reading your site since long before I found out I was pregnant. I’m now due with our first child in a bit more than two months and we will not find out the baby’s sex before the birth. We settled on […]<\/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-8694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2ge","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8694","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=8694"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10653,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8694\/revisions\/10653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}