Decisions decisions

Let's try Blogger's official post titling thing, shall we? Yeah all right, let's.

So further to last week's post, Karen and I have been rifling through The Mother of All Baby Name Books by Bruce Lansky, who is touted not just "the #1 author of baby name books in North America" but also as "the leading author of baby name books". There must be some great cover letters to his publishers there, I'm sure.

Dear Meadowbrook Press,

As you can see, I've come up with another book full of 94,000 names. This time around I've fully researched and included another 3 full spelling variations of the name"Johnathan". Please rush my book into the market straight away as I'm worried many prospective parents are out there unaware of these exciting new options.

Yours sincerely,
Bruce.

Exciting as Bruce's day job must be, reading his magnum opus has not been without its amusements. We've started off with the 'boys' section first not, because it's a preference or anything, but because boy's names are basically crap. Of course I could be biased here due to my attendance at that fine institution Christchurch Boy's High School, where I learned the hard way nobody gives a damn. No sorry, that's actually some lyrics from Tweeter and the Monkey Man by the Travelling Wilburies. What I actually learned the hard way at CBHS are that many teenage boys are cocky bastards. And you must understand here that when I use the word 'cocky', I'm not meaning strutting and arrogant (although for many that description is also perfectly apt) I am in fact using it in a non-OED approved way to mean that they were like cocks. And I don't mean chickens. I see how it could be confusing though, so perhaps I'll coin a new word - cockesque. The point of my story here is that for virtually any boy's name you could care to come up with, there is probably some cockesque individual from school with the same appellation that it would instantly remind me of, making naming my child that name an unsavory prospect. Mmmmm, unsavory.

These are my problems anyway, but for whatever reason Karen also thinks many boy's names are crap. Maybe they just are? Anyway it was to the 'boys' section we went first and sure enough under 'L':

Lando (Portuguese, Spanish) a short form of Orlando, Rolando.

But that wasn't all! On we read, eventually reaching 'Y', where I discovered (and duly laughed at):

Yavin (Hebrew) he will understand

He will understand? Try telling that to the Death Star, buddy.

Nerdy Star Wars jokes aside, there was other stuff to laugh or at least go "what the hell?" at. These fell into a few different categories. Easily rejected names (these are supposedly first names for boy's mind) included:

Sarah
Wrangle
Dag
Trumble
Halcyon
Shaman
Suck Chin (Korean)

and I'm not making this up:

Shangobunni (Yoruba for "gift from Shango", apparently. Cheers, Shango!)

Secondly there were a number of ULTRA-MANLY names I thought we might combine into the something like ULTIMATE MANHOOD monniker:

Blaze Thor Martial King Wolf Maximo Blade Hawk Allan

Sadly Karen ruled this out, although we also ran across "Kestrel" and are giving this serious thought to this as a middle name in order to continue the old "fictional polar explorer" running gag from Celebrities into real life.

A number of names have excellent and curious meanings:

Cicero (Latin) chickpea)
Utatci (Moquelumnan) bear scratching itself
Hesutu (Moquelumnan) picking up a yellow jacket's nest
Montgomery (English) rich man's mountain
Michio (Japanese) man with the strength of three thousand

You have to love those crazy Moquelumans. Actually I wonder about that last one, and where, when, and why it was in Japan that they started going:

Japansese Parent #1: Look at our kid go!

Japansese Parent #2:Whoa! He's really freaking strong!

Japansese Parent #1: You're right there! I reckon he must have the strength of...ten men.

Japanese Parent # 2: No way! He's WAAAAAY stronger than 10 men. Did you see that thing that he just did? You'd need HEAPS more guuys than 10 to do that.

Japanese Parent #1: You're right again! I can see now that my ten men estimate was woefully inadequate. He probably has the strength of...of a THOUSAND men!

Japanese Parent #2: Pfft! He's definitely stronger than a thousand men. We have a thousand men working the fields in our village and they could never get that done. No way no how.

Japanese Parent #1: OK, OK, fine, so he's as strong as ten thousand men.

Japanese Parent #2: Now you're just being silly! We don't want to put pressure on the boy. What will people think when "man with the strength of ten thousand" rolls up? They'll expect miracles. Everything he does will be a disappointment!

Japanese Parent #1: OK, so he's as strong as five thousand men?

Japanese Parent #2: Hmmm, I still feel we're overselling it a tad.

Japanse Parent #1: Three thousand men.

Japanese Parent #2: Three thousand. Yeah, that seems like a pretty solid guesstimate to me.

Japanse Parent #1: Did you just use the word 'guesstimate'? I am SO getting a divorce.

Other names fail to arouse much curiosity in the meaning department:

Ring (English) ring.
Speedy (English) quick.
Loyal (English) faithful, loyal.

Wow. (Also, 'Ring'? Eh?)

Most bizarre of all however was probably discovering the apparent Amercian obsession with the name "Shawn". Our friend Bruce is North America's number 1 baby author after all, not anywhere else's, and listed as perfectly legitimate names throughout the book were:

Keshawn
Trashawn
Tayshawn
Treshawn
Jayshawn
Rayshawn
Shawnta
Tyshawn
Quashawn
Marshawn

...and oh, pity the unfortunate child named:

Reshawn.

(Or maybe pity him only in the event that his family moves to our country full of sheep.)

There were more, too. In every case the book says something like "Marshawn (American) combination of Mark plus Shawn" or "Trashawn (American) combination of Travis plus Shawn" etc. Even weirder, some of those are just Shawn plus a seemingly entirely random prefix or suffix, e.g "Shawnta (American) a combination of Shawn and the suffix Ta" or "Reshawn (American) a combination of the prefix Re + Shawn". What? So if you feel the need you can just take 'Shawn' and stick a random prefix or suffix on it? Is little Reshawn running around in the playground after yet another one of his frequent haircuts with his friends Pishawn and Shawnprawn? Why Shawn, exactly? No seriously, why? It's WEIRD, I tell you.

At any rate I think that after taking all this in it looks like we might be going with Shangobunni Quashawn Allan. Next stop the 'Girls' section.