This is a test, this is a test of the emergency Rant system, Sadly it is not merely a test but a moderately real one. Chris Mata I am sorry, anyone who names their children after media names is destined (hopefully) to be taken out back and beaten by their children. It is unfortunately too late for the children, but the parents got what they deserved.
BTW same goes for a friend of mine whom I love deeply but named his children after Tolkien characters.
Child cruelty is child cruelty.
Other non suitable names are: Female <- pronounced Feh Mall Aye apparently Tommy Hawk <- Child Born in Atlanta after the Braves won a world series Shanda Lear <- Yes of the Lear aircraft family Mark Lemongello <- Pitcher (Houston IIRC) Ima Hogg <- Real Texas Lady Phil McKrackin <- Sadly a Plumber Placenta Ronly Bonly Jones B.S. Carrol <- One of my great uncles Bendigo Jubal <- Another of my friend's children, but not the one that named his children after Tolkien this one comes from L'Amour
Yes I am aware these are all real people. All real people who should take their parents around back and beat them senseless then go to the probate court and get their name changed immediately.
You may return to your regularly scheduled non ranting.
If I have to Google what "Aeryn Sun" is, I guess I'm too old to make fun of such person. Looks like a normal name so far. But it could be taboo to use by most 10-year-olds for all I know.
Ok. Looked it up. No one will know who that is in RL.
Chris Mata As a Texan myself I can appreciate your reply, but it is for your daughter to do as she is the one harmed, not I. Now we have similar backgrounds, similar ages etc. I grew up a few miles west and north of you, but North Texas Culture and East Texas Culture are not that different, might be an interesting time, biggest difference is you have more money since you own a Sonic, I just have half a gun store ;)
Now, if your daughter needs to be taught how to take you out back herself, we have a list of female coaches/trainers at the store, I can find her a good one. Or if she is in Augusta, I know a few female Marines now who teach marksmanship and hand to hand to young ladies locally now so we can get her set up fine.
OK enough TX Bravado.
Mr Jonathan Henry if you are going to suggest something wrong with men named Kelly I know a few hundred thousand Irish and Scottsmen who might disagree and at least 3 that might be sober enough to walk straight. Now Brumbelow is a silly name and no child should have a name 25 charachters long, but nothing wrong w/Kelly
Shawn Driscoll the role Claudia Black played on Farscape.
Oh and I an not making fun of peoples names, I am saying that parents who name their children such things are abusing their children and their children are perefectly justified in returning the abuse.
I think my point is simply what's wrong with naming you kid Aeryn? Sounds like Erin, spelled different. As a rule i actually agree with you, but in practice this instance seems normal to me but I flip hamburgers for a living.
Chris Mata IOS keeps eating my comments when a bird farts so I shall make this short: Imagine a telephone call between your daughter and anyone filling out her info for an appointment, job, etc:
My name is Aeryn, with an A, no not Erin, Aeryn, No not Aaron, not Arin either A E R Y N.
And now we know yet another reason why lines are so long at the DMV.
Certainly better than Claddagh Eowyn or Andrid Eomer, still.
"My name is Aeryn, with an A, no not Erin, Aeryn, No not Aaron, not Arin either A E R Y N."
Sounds pretty normal to me.
"My name is Anthony, with a silent t. No, it's pronounced an-toe-knee not anth-oh-knee, the h is silent. A N T H O N Y."
Plus there are people (including one in my class at school) who write the name exactly the same, but pronounce it differently.
Mildly annoying, but enough that I just switched to Tony for non-legal documents.
I don't think Aeryn is any worse - and a lot better - than many "normal" names. Especially in our multicultural world, where my employee is either "Qing" or "Chin" or something that needs to be written with Cantonese characters.
If the problem is that it's a fantasy/media name, then that's a valid complaint (although strange, since it's pronounced Erin, and isn't standing out as an unusual name)
If the problem is that it's an unusual spelling, then that's a totally different complaint. Also valid, but let's not pretend that the unusual spelling of Aeryn is any worse than Linda/Lynda/Lindall/etc. or Antony/Anthony
By the very definition of most, I have to call bubkiss on that one Sean, Saun, Seun, whatever your name is ;) after all if it is most people they are using standard spellings. If more used non standard than standard, then yes you would be correct. And someone is going to point out that standard means standard, not most common or even majority plus the fact that most people have at least 3 names and so the statistical likelihood of having at least one nonstandard spelling in a name is higher than all of them being nonstandard. However as it turns out, of the most common 200 names in the US, all of them use the standard spelling over 80% of the time and the vast majority far higher than that. Heck my own name has 5 variant forms, however none of them even reach .1%
Sensational spelling is sensational spelling regardless of how you excuse it.
For the record, shawn is the standard spelling, Sean is a variant, but Sean is 2x more popular than Shawn. Neither of which breaks the top 200 names though Sean is #262
Tony Demetriou Sorry, I have no way of responding to the errors in your comments without coming across like an ass, but I shall attempt to say the following in as polite a frame as possible:
We are talking about Americans naming American Children, you cited an Australian source.
I made reference to 3 centuries of bad naming practice above. No one has said anything about people today in reference to changes from an earlier time, other than you.
Alternate names exist does not say anything about how frequent they are in relation to the standard names and this does not thing to add to or take away from either side. In fact Alternate names have been acknowledged and responded to in my comment about the propensity of alternate spellings and the top most 200 name in the US. Example My own name Robert has 5 alternate versions. However, none of them represent even 0.1% of the total of the name Robert. Now in the case of Shawn, his is the primary spelling and the alternate is actually more common by a factor of 2 to 1, if either name was in the most common 200 names it would be a stronger argument.
So I am not certain what you are trying to add to the conversation. did I miss something?
Here is what you are missing: I am a linguistic old guard. You are not going to convince me that a parent naming their child with an an alternate spelling, a variant, or a fantasy name is anything other than a case of sensational spelling unless there is a family history of that name in said person's family.
If you have an uncle named "Throckmorton Lumberjack Bugger" and say it is pronounced "Luxury Yacht" then it is obviously Throckmorton's privilege to beat the living snot out of his parents for naming him something silly. And if you name your child the same then you should get 1.5 times the beating for not learning from his parent's lesson and then passing his name to your child. But it is only 1.5X beating and not 2x beating because you get .5 off for it having a precedence in your family.
Failure to not come across like an ass - complete.
I made reference to 3 centuries of bad naming practice above. No one has said anything about people today in reference to changes from an earlier time, other than you.
I agree that nobody said anything about the era of the naming - to pick a list of top names I had to pick a year. I was explaining why I chose that year.
Alternate names exist does not say anything about how frequent they are in relation to the standard names
I didn't have a convenient data source listing how frequently a name occurs in the USA, and relating that to how frequently there is an alternate spelling for that name, and how frequently that alternate spelling occurs.
If I had all of that, we could estimate a guess at how likely any given person has to explain the spelling of their name.
But I didn't think that would be necessary - the discussion was about how a child with a name like Aeryn would need to spell that out to people, and how that wouldn't be unusual because many people with "normal" names already need to spell it out. Exactly how many people already need to spell out their names didn't seem important to me, that list was intended to just get a ballpark figure.
I ballparked it at maybe 10% - but I'm happy to admit that I might have been wrong. It might be more or less than that by some large margin.
My own name Robert has 5 alternate versions. However, none of them represent even 0.1% of the total of the name Robert.
We can probably, for the purposes of this discussion, say that there are no alternates for the name Robert, if all the alternates make up such a small percentage.
We can probably assume there's an alternate spelling for a name only if someone might be asked to clarify which spelling they use.
Now in the case of Shawn, his is the primary spelling and the alternate is actually more common by a factor of 2 to 1, if either name was in the most common 200 names it would be a stronger argument.
Yes. Names like Shawn, Sara, Anthony etc. Sarah is 5 and Sara is 27. Anthony is number 24.
Sean IS in the most common 200 boys names for 1980 in the US. Number 48. Shawn is 47. So that year at least it looks pretty much 50/50.
So I am not certain what you are trying to add to the conversation. did I miss something?
Shawn said: "I think most people get used to saying how their name is spelled. I did."
You said: "By the very definition of most, I have to call bubkiss on that one" and "However as it turns out, of the most common 200 names in the US, all of them use the standard spelling over 80% of the time and the vast majority far higher than that"
So what I was trying to add was a back-of-the-envelope calculation to support you when you said that most people don't have to say how their name is spelled. But also that the back-of-the-envelope calculation doesn't support you saying that all the most common 200 names use the standard spelling over 80% of the time.
Still, it shows (without knowing exact numbers, as discussed above) that having to explain which spelling your name uses is a relatively unusual situation.
Here is what you are missing: I am a linguistic old guard. You are not going to convince me that a parent naming their child with an an alternate spelling, a variant, or a fantasy name is anything other than a case of sensational spelling unless there is a family history of that name in said person's family.
When did I try to convince you of that? I'm pretty sure I said "that is a valid complaint"
Failure to not come across like an ass - complete.
Reading comprehension failed, too. And statistical analysis fail. And demanding precise data from other people after you made unsupported data-based claims fail.
But we're all friends here, and having a friendly discussion. There's no "winning" or "losing" - so none of that really matters.
You're free to think that Aeryn is a stupid name. Other people are free to think it's an awesome name.
You're also free to think I haven't contributed anything to the discussion (and maybe you're right) and free to think that I'm wrong (and maybe you're right) and free to disagree with anything I post :)
I'm not sure what "linguistic old guard" means, but I've studied language processing at college, and learned some basic Latin, and love etymology - so if you have an interest in any particular area of linguistics I'd love to discuss it with you. I'm always on the look-out to learn from the people around me :)
It means for you, in regards to me, as the great bard Richard Sexton once said: "Plonk."
I did not do back of the envelope anything. I did do a historical and statistical search of names, variant names and variant spellings. Which explains why I wold know things like which spelling is considered standard, what the Ranking of Shawn's name is and how many variants my own has.
Using the specific data I stated, remarkably 3 different search engines will lead you to the same statistical data. You might consider trying such before you declare others to have failed at statistical analysis or reading comprehension. Yes, data personalization was turned off. Maybe you will learn something, I will never become aware of it should you do so.
I second this motion. Love Crichton. I named my daughter after Aeryn Sun
ReplyDelete<3
ReplyDeleteNot bad. At first, I thought that was the Green Lantern actor on the right, who I can't stand. The actor from Farscape is pretty cool.
ReplyDeleteThis is a test, this is a test of the emergency Rant system, Sadly it is not merely a test but a moderately real one.
ReplyDeleteChris Mata I am sorry, anyone who names their children after media names is destined (hopefully) to be taken out back and beaten by their children. It is unfortunately too late for the children, but the parents got what they deserved.
BTW same goes for a friend of mine whom I love deeply but named his children after Tolkien characters.
Child cruelty is child cruelty.
Other non suitable names are:
Female <- pronounced Feh Mall Aye apparently
Tommy Hawk <- Child Born in Atlanta after the Braves won a world series
Shanda Lear <- Yes of the Lear aircraft family
Mark Lemongello <- Pitcher (Houston IIRC)
Ima Hogg <- Real Texas Lady
Phil McKrackin <- Sadly a Plumber
Placenta
Ronly Bonly Jones
B.S. Carrol <- One of my great uncles
Bendigo Jubal <- Another of my friend's children, but not the one that named his children after Tolkien this one comes from L'Amour
Yes I am aware these are all real people. All real people who should take their parents around back and beat them senseless then go to the probate court and get their name changed immediately.
You may return to your regularly scheduled non ranting.
Robert Brumbelow sir I welcome you to be the one to take me out back. :) i must respectfully disagree.
ReplyDeleteAeryn is hardly a lets make fun of the kid kinda name but I just dont make fun of people like I used to i guess.
ReplyDeleteAnybody with the middle name Kelly isn't allowed to poke fun at other folks names.
ReplyDeleteIf I have to Google what "Aeryn Sun" is, I guess I'm too old to make fun of such person. Looks like a normal name so far. But it could be taboo to use by most 10-year-olds for all I know.
ReplyDeleteOk. Looked it up. No one will know who that is in RL.
Chris Mata As a Texan myself I can appreciate your reply, but it is for your daughter to do as she is the one harmed, not I. Now we have similar backgrounds, similar ages etc. I grew up a few miles west and north of you, but North Texas Culture and East Texas Culture are not that different, might be an interesting time, biggest difference is you have more money since you own a Sonic, I just have half a gun store ;)
ReplyDeleteNow, if your daughter needs to be taught how to take you out back herself, we have a list of female coaches/trainers at the store, I can find her a good one. Or if she is in Augusta, I know a few female Marines now who teach marksmanship and hand to hand to young ladies locally now so we can get her set up fine.
OK enough TX Bravado.
Mr Jonathan Henry if you are going to suggest something wrong with men named Kelly I know a few hundred thousand Irish and Scottsmen who might disagree and at least 3 that might be sober enough to walk straight. Now Brumbelow is a silly name and no child should have a name 25 charachters long, but nothing wrong w/Kelly
Shawn Driscoll the role Claudia Black played on Farscape.
ReplyDeleteOh and I an not making fun of peoples names, I am saying that parents who name their children such things are abusing their children and their children are perefectly justified in returning the abuse.
I think my point is simply what's wrong with naming you kid Aeryn? Sounds like Erin, spelled different. As a rule i actually agree with you, but in practice this instance seems normal to me but I flip hamburgers for a living.
ReplyDeleteChris Mata IOS keeps eating my comments when a bird farts so I shall make this short: Imagine a telephone call between your daughter and anyone filling out her info for an appointment, job, etc:
ReplyDeleteMy name is Aeryn, with an A, no not Erin, Aeryn, No not Aaron, not Arin either A E R Y N.
And now we know yet another reason why lines are so long at the DMV.
Certainly better than Claddagh Eowyn or Andrid Eomer, still.
"My name is Aeryn, with an A, no not Erin, Aeryn, No not Aaron, not Arin either A E R Y N."
ReplyDeleteSounds pretty normal to me.
"My name is Anthony, with a silent t. No, it's pronounced an-toe-knee not anth-oh-knee, the h is silent. A N T H O N Y."
Plus there are people (including one in my class at school) who write the name exactly the same, but pronounce it differently.
Mildly annoying, but enough that I just switched to Tony for non-legal documents.
I don't think Aeryn is any worse - and a lot better - than many "normal" names. Especially in our multicultural world, where my employee is either "Qing" or "Chin" or something that needs to be written with Cantonese characters.
If the problem is that it's a fantasy/media name, then that's a valid complaint (although strange, since it's pronounced Erin, and isn't standing out as an unusual name)
If the problem is that it's an unusual spelling, then that's a totally different complaint. Also valid, but let's not pretend that the unusual spelling of Aeryn is any worse than Linda/Lynda/Lindall/etc. or Antony/Anthony
I think most people get used to saying how their name is spelled. I did.
ReplyDeleteBy the very definition of most, I have to call bubkiss on that one Sean, Saun, Seun, whatever your name is ;) after all if it is most people they are using standard spellings. If more used non standard than standard, then yes you would be correct. And someone is going to point out that standard means standard, not most common or even majority plus the fact that most people have at least 3 names and so the statistical likelihood of having at least one nonstandard spelling in a name is higher than all of them being nonstandard. However as it turns out, of the most common 200 names in the US, all of them use the standard spelling over 80% of the time and the vast majority far higher than that. Heck my own name has 5 variant forms, however none of them even reach .1%
ReplyDeleteSensational spelling is sensational spelling regardless of how you excuse it.
For the record, shawn is the standard spelling, Sean is a variant, but Sean is 2x more popular than Shawn. Neither of which breaks the top 200 names though Sean is #262
Robert Brumbelow My name comes from Johann, which comes from John, etc. Anyway, I often go by my maiden name.
ReplyDeleteTop 100 baby names 1980... (so that we don't say "people these days give crazy names")
ReplyDeletehttp://www.essentialbaby.com.au/pregnancy/baby-names/1980
I'm seeing a lot of names that have alternate spelling. I don't think "most" have variations, but it's certainly not uncommon. Maybe 1 in 10?
Tony Demetriou Sorry, I have no way of responding to the errors in your comments without coming across like an ass, but I shall attempt to say the following in as polite a frame as possible:
ReplyDeleteWe are talking about Americans naming American Children, you cited an Australian source.
I made reference to 3 centuries of bad naming practice above. No one has said anything about people today in reference to changes from an earlier time, other than you.
Alternate names exist does not say anything about how frequent they are in relation to the standard names and this does not thing to add to or take away from either side. In fact Alternate names have been acknowledged and responded to in my comment about the propensity of alternate spellings and the top most 200 name in the US. Example My own name Robert has 5 alternate versions. However, none of them represent even 0.1% of the total of the name Robert. Now in the case of Shawn, his is the primary spelling and the alternate is actually more common by a factor of 2 to 1, if either name was in the most common 200 names it would be a stronger argument.
So I am not certain what you are trying to add to the conversation. did I miss something?
Here is what you are missing: I am a linguistic old guard. You are not going to convince me that a parent naming their child with an an alternate spelling, a variant, or a fantasy name is anything other than a case of sensational spelling unless there is a family history of that name in said person's family.
If you have an uncle named "Throckmorton Lumberjack Bugger" and say it is pronounced "Luxury Yacht" then it is obviously Throckmorton's privilege to beat the living snot out of his parents for naming him something silly. And if you name your child the same then you should get 1.5 times the beating for not learning from his parent's lesson and then passing his name to your child. But it is only 1.5X beating and not 2x beating because you get .5 off for it having a precedence in your family.
Failure to not come across like an ass - complete.
Robert Brumbelow
ReplyDeleteWe are talking about Americans naming American Children, you cited an Australian source.
Sorry for the Australian source. Since I'm Australian, Google automatically biases the results to Australian sources.
Here's a US list, the names are in slightly different order but are mostly the same:
http://www.babycenter.com/0_100-most-popular-baby-names-of-1980_1738068.bc
I made reference to 3 centuries of bad naming practice above. No one has said anything about people today in reference to changes from an earlier time, other than you.
I agree that nobody said anything about the era of the naming - to pick a list of top names I had to pick a year. I was explaining why I chose that year.
Alternate names exist does not say anything about how frequent they are in relation to the standard names
I didn't have a convenient data source listing how frequently a name occurs in the USA, and relating that to how frequently there is an alternate spelling for that name, and how frequently that alternate spelling occurs.
If I had all of that, we could estimate a guess at how likely any given person has to explain the spelling of their name.
But I didn't think that would be necessary - the discussion was about how a child with a name like Aeryn would need to spell that out to people, and how that wouldn't be unusual because many people with "normal" names already need to spell it out. Exactly how many people already need to spell out their names didn't seem important to me, that list was intended to just get a ballpark figure.
I ballparked it at maybe 10% - but I'm happy to admit that I might have been wrong. It might be more or less than that by some large margin.
My own name Robert has 5 alternate versions. However, none of them represent even 0.1% of the total of the name Robert.
We can probably, for the purposes of this discussion, say that there are no alternates for the name Robert, if all the alternates make up such a small percentage.
We can probably assume there's an alternate spelling for a name only if someone might be asked to clarify which spelling they use.
Now in the case of Shawn, his is the primary spelling and the alternate is actually more common by a factor of 2 to 1, if either name was in the most common 200 names it would be a stronger argument.
Yes. Names like Shawn, Sara, Anthony etc.
Sarah is 5 and Sara is 27. Anthony is number 24.
Sean IS in the most common 200 boys names for 1980 in the US. Number 48. Shawn is 47. So that year at least it looks pretty much 50/50.
So I am not certain what you are trying to add to the conversation. did I miss something?
Shawn said: "I think most people get used to saying how their name is spelled. I did."
You said: "By the very definition of most, I have to call bubkiss on that one"
and
"However as it turns out, of the most common 200 names in the US, all of them use the standard spelling over 80% of the time and the vast majority far higher than that"
So what I was trying to add was a back-of-the-envelope calculation to support you when you said that most people don't have to say how their name is spelled. But also that the back-of-the-envelope calculation doesn't support you saying that all the most common 200 names use the standard spelling over 80% of the time.
Still, it shows (without knowing exact numbers, as discussed above) that having to explain which spelling your name uses is a relatively unusual situation.
Here is what you are missing: I am a linguistic old guard. You are not going to convince me that a parent naming their child with an an alternate spelling, a variant, or a fantasy name is anything other than a case of sensational spelling unless there is a family history of that name in said person's family.
ReplyDeleteWhen did I try to convince you of that?
I'm pretty sure I said "that is a valid complaint"
Failure to not come across like an ass - complete.
Reading comprehension failed, too. And statistical analysis fail. And demanding precise data from other people after you made unsupported data-based claims fail.
But we're all friends here, and having a friendly discussion. There's no "winning" or "losing" - so none of that really matters.
You're free to think that Aeryn is a stupid name. Other people are free to think it's an awesome name.
You're also free to think I haven't contributed anything to the discussion (and maybe you're right) and free to think that I'm wrong (and maybe you're right) and free to disagree with anything I post :)
I'm not sure what "linguistic old guard" means, but I've studied language processing at college, and learned some basic Latin, and love etymology - so if you have an interest in any particular area of linguistics I'd love to discuss it with you. I'm always on the look-out to learn from the people around me :)
It means for you, in regards to me, as the great bard Richard Sexton once said: "Plonk."
ReplyDeleteI did not do back of the envelope anything. I did do a historical and statistical search of names, variant names and variant spellings. Which explains why I wold know things like which spelling is considered standard, what the Ranking of Shawn's name is and how many variants my own has.
Using the specific data I stated, remarkably 3 different search engines will lead you to the same statistical data. You might consider trying such before you declare others to have failed at statistical analysis or reading comprehension. Yes, data personalization was turned off. Maybe you will learn something, I will never become aware of it should you do so.
I have issue with people putting an extra h in my first name or changing the last a to an o.
ReplyDeleteI had a kid at the electric company try and argue with me about how i spell my name.
I have also had people who wanted to spell my last name with an I. Like i am some sort of valley girl.
You can't win for losing with opinions being like assholes and such.