“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is a popular quote from William J. Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet says it does not matter that her boyfriend is from a rival family and has a neck tattoo.
Essentially, she is arguing that the names of things do not affect the reality of what they are, which just shows you what idiots teenage girls are. Names matter. Please, no letters.
Every year, sa国际传媒’s Vital Statistics Agency provides a list of the most popular baby names from the birth registrations received over the year. The list includes every name that was chosen five or more times. And the 2024 winners are …
Top 10 boy names: Oliver (216), Liam (166), Noah (163), Theodore (151), Lucas (144), Leo (125), William (120), Henry (120), Ethan (116) and Levi (115).
Top 10 girl names: Olivia (172), Charlotte (146), Isla (135), Amelia (134), Emma (121), Sophia (117), Chloe (110), Ava (108), Lily (105) and Evelyn (100).
These are good, traditional names and I am surprised and delighted by what a great job parents are doing, even though some of them voted for the BC Conservatives.
There will always be people who think it’s better to go with an eccentric name for their defenceless baby: Stormy, Namaste, Oleander, that kind of thing. If you have one of those, please don’t be offended when I say the rest of us are tired of your dumb name.
It’s exhausting and while yes, technically, your parents are to blame, there are lawyers on every corner and you could change that thing by deed poll anytime. Remember: Sage and Gemini and Alberta are not real names.
Of course, tastes change over time. If you’re looking to see how names have changed in our province, Google “Compare Baby Name Popularity in sa国际传媒” and you’ll find a neat tool the government developed to chart the popularity of names over the last 100 years.
For example, the high water mark for Davids in British Columbia was the year 1960, when 880 of us were christened. Since then, we have been in a steady decline. There were 679 Davids in 1967, the year I was born, but just 39 last year.
Other Davids from the Golden Era who immediately come to mind include Fincher (film director, born 1962), Duchovny (X-Files actor, 1960), Schwimmer (Friends actor, 1966), Lee Roth (Van Halen singer, 1954), Spade (comedian, 1964), Hasselhoff (cheeseburger-eating wunderkind, 1952), Bowie (singer and spaceman, 1947), Blaine (magician, 1973), Beckham (professional tattoo dummy, 1975), Tennant (Dr. Who, 1971), Cross (comedian, 1964), Eby (gigantic lawyer, 1976) and Foster (Grammy-winning Canadian musician, producer and serial married man, 1949).
Not to mention all the Davids I went to school with: 70% of the boys and 5% of the girls.
From memory, 90% of the girls my daughter went to school with were named Kyla, Kayla, Kaitlyn, Kailyn and the like. The boys were all named Brendan, Brayden or Brandon. Both Brendan and the Kaitlyn variants come to us from Irish, a Celtic language based in alcoholism.
This highlights the importance of looking up the original meaning of a name before choosing it. In the example above, Brendan means – I swear I’m not making this up – “stinking hair.”
Many experts recommend that you pick a name that honours your culture. Obviously not if your culture is a weirdo, primitive one that venerates the Confederate flag, trucks and opioid addiction. “Bubba” is not a real name, and no baby girl should be saddled with a hyphenated mess like “Sue-Ellen-Jo-Bob.”
How names sound is important, because any name that rhymes with “at,” “it,” “ut,” “uck,” or “unt” will be turned into a playground insult. What worked for Dr. Suess will not work for you. This is because kids are always meaner than you expect. NOTE: If a kid is near you right now, keep an eye on him. And don’t mention that I said anything!
Many names come with traditional, shorter, nicknames. For example, regardless of what you want your little Charles called, somebody along the way – probably me – is going to shorten Charles to Chuck and then sing, “Chuck Chuck Bo Buck, Banana Fana Fo – ” until his wife hits him.
Similarly I would stay away from naming your son — or daughter — Richard. It’s going to be shortened to something he — or she — won’t like.
A middle name can be a great way to use traditional family names, which, let’s face it, are often British and hard-to-tell-the-gender. On the plus side, if there’s even a small chance of securing an inheritance by playing up to Great Uncle Evelyn, it could be worth it.
Don’t stress too much about all this. While picking the right name is important, should you realize you made a mistake after the baby arrives, you have options.
First, you can always fall back on the middle name, using an initial for the first name, such as G. Gordon Liddy and J. Edgar Hoover, both completely normal, stable, respectable figures.
Second, ignore the official name and rely on a nickname of your own choosing, based on either physical attributes such as “Fatty” and “Stinky,” or aspirational goals like “Elon Musk” and “Vladimir Putin.”
Finally, you can lean into sa国际传媒’s most popular names and go full Juliet: legally change the name to Oliver-Olivia Montague-Capulet.
That should cover all the bases and besides, that which we call a baby by any other name would smell as sweet.
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