h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I haven't read all these posts, so apologise if anybody else has mentioned this yet. I was told by a friend before my first child was born that a parent should consider the "judge rule". If you can say "All rise for the honourable (insert child's name)" without flinching, then well and good. If not you are condemning them to a life where they can never be really taken seriously, at least not at first.

A woman who shared a maternity ward with my sister in law called her daughter "Sparkles". Suppose her last name was Smith. Now try "All rise for the honourable Judge Sparkles Smith". Nope. Sounds like a stripper going for the dominatrix look. Nothing against strippers by the way, and if that is what you hope your daughter will grow up to be, then by all means name her Sparkles.

Then there's the fact that "Sparkles" might grow up to be a 300 pound heifer with an armful of tattoos. She may even do it to spite you. Imagine saddling someone who is inherently not "sparkly" with that name in the hope that she would be. Gawd help her if she's not.

Let's not name children as we would pets, in order to gratify our own egos. Children carry their names through life and they absolutely do affect a person's first impression of them. Particulary in the negative sense.

Let me try to give an example, an Emily may or may not have been born of trailer trash, but you can lay odds that Shanaya was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Peter might have come from poverty, but it's an almost dead cert that Dylan was not born into the Rockerfellers.

My advice is go for neutral, older, even old fashioned names. The only connotations Peter and Lucy might hold are that they went to Narnia with their siblings Edmund and Susan.

Regards







Same with boys.