Hey, did your parent(s) ever tell you what you'd have been named if you'd been born with a different chromosomal package? I would have been named Anthony, which makes little sense. It's not a family name. Perhaps my mother had a thing for Anthony Hopkins or Anthony Perkins (Norman Bates!) in the '60s?
Ben might've been a Julia Rose. We had plenty of girl names we liked, but hadn't settled on a boy name before he was born. In fact, for his first three days of life, we called him something else—the name that became his middle name. (The bonus of having a baby in the NICU is that you can shoo away the birth-certificate-filler-outer person for days on end, and need not worry that you'll leave the hospital before naming the kid.)
A lot of parents do settle on both boy and girl names for a baby, particularly if they don't know the baby's sex in advance. What might you have been named if you'd been born with a different set of gonads?
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Your home for scattered bits about language, my kid, feminism, things that happen to me and things that cross my mind
Twitter Updates
About Me
- Orange
- I'm an all-purpose word geek: I write (blogs, plus a book), I edit (medical stuff), I read (mostly blogs and magazines...that stack of unread books glares at me from beneath the dust), and I play with words (crossword puzzles are a strong favorite).
Bloggers I've Met
Bloggers I Must Meet
- A Little Pregnant
- Absent Minded Housewife
- Bacon After Dark
- Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk
- Churp, Churp
- Creek Running North
- Go Fug Yourself
- I Blame the Patriarchy
- Language Log
- Mona's Barbaric Yawp
- Oral Hygiene Queen
- Pandagon
- SBFH
- So Close
- The Assimilated Negro
- Thought Concoction
- Welcome to the Nut House
- you don't have to read
15 comments:
I would have been Patrick, so Patricia is my middle name. We had the Girl's name picked out way before the Boy was identified as a boy. It took us quite awhile to settle on a boy's name.
Oh, I'm not sure what my boy's name would have been - but I do know that my father very definitely wanted to call me Matilda, and my mum refused to. Sometimes I think of Matilda as my secret other identity ;-)
My parents picked a girl's name and a boy's name, had one of each, and that was that. So if I'd been a boy (I was first) I would have had the name that became my brother's.
My father threated to name me Lipase but he was just trying to get a rise out of my mother. That kept him occupied for over 50 years, and he never got tired of it. Ah, love.
I would have been Douglas David--it's sort of a, "My Two Dads" story. I'm happy to be a girl.
David. If he'd been a girl, PK would have been Eleanor, I think.
I would have been Brian. My little sister would have been Brian too. She married a Brian though. He's a cheese.
My husband and I agreed that if our kids were boys he'd name them. If they were girls I'd name them. We got veto power if the name was atrocious, but otherwise he named our boys. Had they been girls they would have been named Erin, Rachel and Rhea.
I don't know if I would have had a different name--I'm named after my dad, but don't know if my parents would have gone that way if I'd been a boy.
My brother wanted to name my older nephew Thor, or Conan, or I forget the third (equally ridiculous) choice. (I advocated for my maternal grandfather's name, but my brother couldn't get anywhere with Guido, either.) When they were picking names for the younger nephew, bro advocated for Vladimir and taught 3 y.o. older nephew to say it/advocate for it. Also without success.
Had I been a boy I would have been Ian, named indirectly after my dad -- his name is John, and we have Scottish heritage, and Ian is the Scottish variant of John.
For our son, my partner refused to even talk about names until after he was born, so we never even had a discussion about girl names. My preferred name for a boy was Evan, but I got vetoed. We only had a serious discussion about 2 names -- Iain and Liam, and Liam won out. If it had been a girl, I would have pushed for Caitlin or Miranda.
the name I've got was a leftover from what my mom wanted her much younger brother to be named if he had been a girl.
If I'd been a boy they were going to name me Roy Wayne. I think I would have had to be born with spurs on for that to fit.
I would've been Nicholas. If O. had been a girl, he would have been Clara. We knew Roo was a girl from early on, so we never came up with a boy name for her. But we entertained the idea of Clara for her, and quickly decided that would seem weird, like recycling (even though we never actually named anyone that).
I would have been named Amon. So, yeah, pretty happy I was born a girl.
E. - Interesting - Lowell was going to be Willa and I had the same weird feeling about using that name when we found out we were having a girl the second time. But my husband was adamant and I couldn't come up with an alternative so Willa she is.
I would have been Christopher, which is related to my name only by the first letter.
I'd have been Joshua.
I would have been a Nicholas or an Eric.
If I had been a boy, I would have been Cadwallader.
No, really: apparently they were serious about this.
Post a Comment