Family intervention

[muckefuck]

I'm in total agreement with my brother-in-law when it comes to naming children and he insists "You have to have a theme" and his choice of one--begining with vowel letters in alphabetical order--isn't bad. But something must be done to prevent my sister from going with her choice of a name that is:

1. Different from his older brother's name by only one segment (i.e. /ð/)
2. Horribly trendy (ranked 68 in the USA last year compared to 156th most popular when we were born)

At yesterday's barbecue, I pressed my case that since gentle persuasion has failed--Isidore ("Patron saint of the Internet!"), Ignatius Loyola ("He'd get into the Jesuit college of his choice--FOR FREE!"), Immanuel, and Ichabod have all ended up on the trash heap--the time has come for concerted unilateral action: We need to form a consensus on a nickname now and begin employing it exactly as if his parents' choice were a figment of someone's imagination.

My model for a successful nicknaming is my mother's baby brother. When I was an adolescent, I couldn't figure out why all my cousins called him "Butch" when Mom had told me he was named "Vincent". The family story is that he was a very pretty baby. When his older sisters took him out for a ride in the buggy, passers-by were forever asking, "She's so beautiful, what's her name?" Someone (no one can agree who) started replying "Butch" and it stuck--boy, did it stick.

We tossed around dozens of possibilities without coming to any agreement. Here's an incomplete list:

• Slim
• Sly
• Slimer
• Tad(pole)
• Dale [requires renaming older brother "Chip"]
• Ion
• iBaby
• Ivan [from his stepmother by phone]
• Killer

Hmm--they seemed better in a post-prandial caipirinha haze. Do any of them look like they might have legs? Further suggestions?

Comments

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Depends if the names are Vietnamese or Anglo-American. A lot of Vietnamese syllables begin with <q> (including the very common "middle name" Quang), so this wouldn't be a problem. But I assume you mean Anglo-American names, since Vietnamese and other East Asian names generally follow rather different formal rules.

Some Chinese lineages have family poems which are used to generate given names. Members of each generation have a character of the poem as a "generation name" or first element of their given name; the next generation will use the next character in the poem, and so forth. This has its basis in Confucian notions of generational hierarchy, which demand a certain protocol between members of different generations regardless of their relative ages and, therefore, place a premium on being able to identify and recall someone's rank easily. As those notions die away, many families have abandoned this system, but it's still widespread to use a common first element among siblings. (There are also more complex ways of linking generations or siblings. For instance, I knew one family where each of the three boys had a one-character name (all the rage in modern China) which consisted of a single radical repeated thrice. The son I knew was called Pin (品), but I can't remember the names of his brothers.)

If your co-worker was Sino-Vietnamese (and a lot of Vietnamese immigrants to the USA are actually of ethnic Chinese origin), his family might have used such a system for the Chinese-derived names. I don't know Vietnamese naming customs as well. I know that men typically have two-part given names and that the first elements of these are generally taking from a very small pool (still at least an order of magnitude bigger than that for women, who until recently universally took Thị), but it seems that these are sometimes generational elements, sometimes birth-order elements, and sometimes have other functions.

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

I know a couple who named their son Joachim so they could call him Jake. His second name was Benno. The wife was an francophone British Sephardic Jew and her husband... was from the Bronx.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I can't remember the last time I met a native-born American with the name "Joachim". It seems to be a given name much more popular elsewhere (e.g. Joaquin, Achim, Gioacchino, etc.) than in the USA. If I met someone named "Joachim Benno", I'd be shocked to discover they weren't German.

Most Ashkenazi Jews I know still do the religoius name/civic name thing, but I get the impression that tradition isn't as strong among Sephardim.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

There are a couple of young (native-born) Joachims in my extended social circle. The first time I heard the nickname "Joa" (pronounced Yoah, of course) I was certain I'd misheard.