Naming Right

A friend of mine with a daughter named Michaela once told me that she picked the name thinking that it would be unique, since she'd never heard of anyone else having it. Nowadays there are indeed a few Michaelas to go around, including one that Dena and I saw on T.V. during dinner tonight.

Fortunately we came up with a method for picking children's names that almost guarantees singularity.

We needed a random name length. So we grabbed the Heartland Community College course magazine and scanned it until we came upon the first instance of any of the numbers 5 through 9. Turned out that we saw the number 6 first.

Then we randomly pointed a pen at different places in the book until we'd identified six letters. Fortunately they were a reasonable mix of vowels and consonants:

O N E T L C

Next I wrote down the letters M and F in a random order, and asked Dena to pick a number between 1 and 2. She picked 2, which meant that our child was female.

Then we just rearranged the letters to suit.

Our favorites:

Noclet (pronounced KNOCK-let)
Tolcen (TOLL-sen)
Contel (kon-TELL... this is for the African daughter we adopt)

Cut from the list:

Cloten (KLO-ten)... maybe if it were a boy.
Contle (CON-tle)... too much like a verb.
Clento (CLEN-toe)... for some reason, sounds like a dwarf.

The next sequence of letters was Q A R E T C O.

No matter what we tried, our poor boy sounded like he was fresh off the reservation:

Creatoq (CREE-a-tock)
Tracqeo (tra-KAY-oh)
Treaqoc (TREE-cock)... say WHAT?

America is losing its creative edge. I want to live in a nation where someday my grandchildren can pay a visit to their Aunt Contle and Uncle Treaqoc, or play tag with cousin Gayjone.