Kristina writes:<\/p>\n
Hello Swistle!
\nThough I am not expecting, I follow your blog religiously and am known to say things like “Well Swistle says…” when talking to friends about baby names. My boyfriend and I have been talking about future baby names and we don’t agree on almost anything. During a discussion, the name Annabelle came up and he actually liked it! This coming from a man who suggested Linda, and followed up with “What’s wrong with Linda?”*<\/p>\nAnnabelle was the name of my dog we had for 15 years from when I was 1 to 16. We called her Annie and I loved her. But, because we had her for so long, my family and many of my friends know we had a dog named Annabelle. Would it be too much to use for a baby? Have any of your readers named a Max or Charlie or Daisy after having a childhood pet of the same name?<\/p>\n
Thank you for your thoughts!
\nKristina<\/p>\n*What IS the deal with Linda? It seems like it should work, has the LIN of many popular names and the -a ending of Emma and Amelia and Sophia, but no one uses it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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Let’s start with what the deal is with Linda. I’d say the primary deal is that it was in the Top 10 from 1940 until 1965 (it’s famous for being the name that finally booted the name Mary from its long-held #1 spot), so it’s a Mom Name or a Grandma Name now. It’s very likely to come back into style, but not yet; I’d look for it among your grandchildren or great-grandchildren.<\/p>\n
A secondary issue is that although it ends in -a, what it really ends in is -da. The -da ending is not currently in style: Melinda, Miranda, Belinda, Ida, Wanda, Lucinda, Brenda, Amanda, Freda, Glenda, Hilda, Rhonda, Rhoda—all names to look for again in the future, but not popular right this minute. The only ones I can think of that would be fashionable for current babies are Matilda and Ada. Matilda is a bit of a style outlier: fashionable in part because it’s not fashionable; Ada is likely piggybacking on the popularity of Ava.<\/p>\n
And although the name Linda has the Lin- sound, it has it at the beginning of the name, when the current fashion is more likely to have it at the end.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I think it would be fine to use a childhood pet’s name. Pets, I’ve noticed, often get the names that are just about to come into style: the ones that still seem a little too out-there to actually use for a baby, but in about ten or fifteen years will be THE hit names. (Plus, many people acquire animals before they have children, and use their favorite names without thinking ahead.) I named cats George and Oliver, names I thought were safe because I wouldn’t ever want to use them on a baby—until about fifteen years later, when I was agonizing to Paul about how we just COULDN’T use those names…could we? We decided no, not while the cats were still on this mortal coil. But it was mostly because Paul said his mother would never let us hear the end of it. “She’ll say, ‘The boy who was named after a cat, har har!,’ and she’ll keep saying it,” said Paul convincingly. If it hadn’t been for that, we might have gone ahead: the cats’ time with us was bound to be shortish at that point, and I didn’t think anyone else would give us any trouble about it.<\/p>\n
But if we’d wanted to use the names of our childhood cats (well, the names of MY childhood cats: Paul’s cats were named Licorice and Butterscotch and you will NEVER GUESS what colors they were, oh wait you will guess instantly), we definitely would have gone ahead with that. For one thing, at this point I find I don’t really remember the names of my friends’ childhood pets; my guess is that most other people aren’t keeping that information on file either, or even remembering the names of our CURRENT pets. But if I imagine one of my friends using the name of a pet for a child, I can’t picture myself having much of a reaction to it: mild interest, followed by forgetting about it. If I used such a name, I’d be prepared for a brief startled reaction (“Like Annie!!”) and perhaps a brief conversation on the interesting topic, but that’s it. I would think ahead of time of some Things To Say, such as “I know! But we loved the name, and of course Annie just made me love the name even more.” It helps in this case that you called her Annie: perhaps many people will remember her that way, and not even make the connection with the name Annabelle.<\/p>\n
I too would be interested to know if anyone here has in fact named a child the same name as a childhood pet. I’d like to hear the stories: if you struggled with the idea of using a former (or current) pet’s name; what the reactions were and how quickly that stopped; etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kristina writes: Hello Swistle! Though I am not expecting, I follow your blog religiously and am known to say things like “Well Swistle says…” when talking to friends about baby names. My boyfriend and I have been talking about future baby names and we don’t agree on almost anything. During a discussion, the name Annabelle […]<\/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-9813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2yh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9813","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=9813"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9824,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9813\/revisions\/9824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}