A. writes:

I love your blog and check it everyday for inspiration and just to read your insight. I wrote to you last May regarding my interest in using one of my students’ names as a possible middle name for a future child. A month later I got pregnant! So your advice and the advice of your readers on that topic may be put to good use very shortly if we have a girl.

I’m writing because we’re having some trouble with boys’ names. The troubles that we’re having seem to be the same that we’ve been having for months and months, so I thought it might finally be time to ask for some help.

I am due in March and we are not finding out the sex of the baby ahead of time. We’d like to go to the hospital with two full girls’ names and two full boys’ names ready to go and then decide after the baby is born. If this baby is a girl, her first name will be either Eleanor or Margaret. The student’s name that I wrote to you about back in May (with an “e” added to the end, as several readers suggested) will be used as the middle name if the baby is a girl and looks like an Eleanor. If she looks like a Margaret, then her middle name will be Linnea.

Even though I’m still a little nervous about the potential awkwardness if we do decide to use the student’s name as a middle name, I am so much more stressed about naming this baby if it’s a boy. Obviously, we’d like something that would compliment Margaret and Eleanor since it’s possible that we’d use them as names for future children. We seem to be narrowing down our list pretty closely, but I have “problems” with all of our choices. This bothers me because I have no such “problems” with either of our girl names. Here are our top three contenders for boys:

Charles

I like this name a lot and when I imagine having a child named Charlie, I swoon a little. It seems like a name that is well-liked, that won’t be too popular (although it’s more popular in my state than in the US as a whole), and a name that carries some weight with it. I’m a science nerd, so I love the idea that he’d have a nice normal name, but that inwardly I’d know that I’d named him for Charles Darwin. The two concerns that I have are:

1. Would the nickname Charlie sound bad with our last name? Our last name is Ashleigh-Wertman (not spelled exactly that way, but you get the idea). Does the “ee” sound a the end of Charlie sound bad with the “ee” sound at the end of Ashleigh?

2. I have never been able to find a satisfactory answer to the question of how to posessify (is that a word?) names that end in an “s.” Is it written Charles’ or Charles’s? And how should it be pronounced?  I know that this may seem like a minor point when choosing a child’s name, but for some reason it really stresses me out to think of my poor kid being corrected by teachers right and left because different style guide writers seem to have different opinions. Am I over-thinking it? How do parents deal with this? I’m kind of a stickler for grammar rules, so I’m really frustrated that I can’t seem to find a single answer that everyone can agree on when it comes to this topic.

Arthur

I love this name. I think it’s interesting and unusual and that it sounds very smart and quirky. It’s also a name that appears a few times in my husband’s family so he’s warmer to it than most of my other quirky suggestions. The troubles:

1. My first name is like “Garden” (but without the “G”). Does Arthur sound too similar? I’m already not a fan of repeated initials within a family and on top of that the repeated “Ar” sound at the beginning of both names seems a bit much. When I say my name, my husband’s name, and the name Arthur all together, it sounds a little weird to me for a family. If I throw in some other names (like, if we used Arthur for a second or third child) then it sounds a little better, but when it’s just the three of us I worry that it will sound too matchy. Also, I’m a little worried about flying together. With our long hyphenated last name, the only way to differentiate between my husband’s boarding pass and my boarding pass is with the one or two letters of our first names that show up. One time, an airline employee scanned my boarding pass and then my husband’s and the machine made a beeping sound. She said, “Oh wait….oh, I see, Ashleigh-Wertman, A. and Ashleigh-Wertman, B. Okay, you can go through.” But what if it had been me and my son flying? They would both have shown up as Ashleigh-Wertman, A and would that have been a problem? From her reaction, it sounded as though the concern may have been that someone could have just tried to copy the same boarding pass and use it for two people or something. Flying has already gotten to be such a headache . . . but surely there are fathers and sons with the exact same name, so it can’t be an insurmountable issue, right?

2. The other trouble is that it’s really hard for me to stay neutral on this name. With many other names, I can picture the name on lots of different kinds of people. But with Arthur, I can really only picture it on a smart, studious, nerdy person. My husband and I are both smart, studious, nerdy people, so the association is not a bad one for us, but what if our kid is drastically different from us? Will we have saddled him with a name that just won’t fit his personality? I don’t know any Arthurs under the age of 60 (besides the cartoon Aardvark on PBS), so it’s really difficult to figure out how this name will be received by others.

William

This is a nice, classic name that has stood the test of time pretty well. I like the way that it sounds and I can imagine it on a ton of different personalities. The troubles:

1. It’s so popular! I know that even the most popular names aren’t as popular as they used to be and that William certainly isn’t a “trendy” name in the sense that it will sound dated in a few years, but it’s really hard for me to choose the #3 name in America (and #2 in my state!) for my child. I mean, according to the SSA, I was one of only 14 baby girls in the United States  who received my first name in the year that I was born. Last year, there were over a thousand times as many Williams.  I know that, statistically speaking, that would still make it very unlikely that he’d be one of three Williams in his class or whatnot, but it’s certainly more likely than if he had a name that was at least out of the top 10. Especially since this is our first child, I’m not exposed to playgroups and daycares that would give me a better sense of how common this name is in our area, so I’m very nervous about bestowing it on my child.

2. I can’t find a nickname that I like for this name and “William” on it’s own sounds a little heavy for a baby. I don’t like Bill or Billy. I could get on board with Will, but probably not until he was at least a little older. I may be juvenile, but “Willy” sounds a little too much like a euphemism for a penis. I like the name Liam, but my husband had a really bad experience with a Liam, so we’d never use it. I know that William on it’s own isn’t a terribly long name and that it’s fine to use it in it’s entirety, but my husband’s family is REALLY into nicknames, so I’d like to at least like some of the options.

My other trouble is that I feel like I associate Charles and Arthur together. Like, if we decide to go with Charles, I’d want the first-middle combo to be Charles Arthur and if we went with Arthur I’d want the first-middle combo to be Arthur Charles. (William seems to be its own entity in my mind…) So I feel as though if we have a boy and go with either Charles or Arthur, it will rule out the other one for a future sibling because it will be this boy’s middle name. Maybe I need to start looking into other middle name possibilities, but for some reason I feel really stuck on these two as a “pair.”

So ultimately I need some help with answering some of my naming questions and I also need some help with prioritizing/getting over my naming concerns. Before narrowing down to these three, our closest runners-up were George, Leo, Ian and Isaac. I think we’d be willing to resurrect some of these if the problems with our top three seem insurmountable, but of course each of these was eliminated for it’s own issues and I think my husband has grown so tired of the naming discussion that he’d rather not re-hash any of the old names.

Of course, if you have any fresh suggestions I’d appreciate hearing them too!

I’m going to start with the question about making a name that ends in S possessive. A person is singular, and so a person’s name is a singular noun, and singular nouns ending in S are made possessive by adding an apostrophe-S. So if Charles has a hat, it’s Charles’s hat—just as it’s Jacob’s hat or Isabella’s hat or Tess’s hat. The final letter of the name doesn’t change anything: it’s always [Name]’s hat. In the case of Charles, it would be pronounced with a repeating Z sound. With time and practice the Z sound of the apostrophe-S gets diminished (shorter and quieter) so it’s not quite so zizzley: Charlez-z hat.

The one exception to this rule is Jesus (probably because three Z sounds in a row didn’t sound dignified enough for prayers): it’s Jesus’ hat and it’s pronounced the same as Jesus (“In Jesus name, Amen”). This exception has caused two thousand years of people not being able to remember what to do with Charles’s hat.

Once you’ve memorized this, a new problem emerges: will you be able to stand it when no one else seems to know the rule—including, as you mention, some of his teachers? There was a baby James in the daycare classroom where I used to work, and that experience showed me that it can be painful to know something few others know. I once saw someone write “Jame’s.” On something that was then laminated. That baby James is in high school now, and I am still agitating about it.

But if your son mostly goes by Charlie, it’s going to be Charlie’s hat anyway. And swooning when you imagine having a son named Charlie is a very good sign for the name. It does seem unfortunate that the -leigh in his surname will echo the -lie of his nickname; only you will be able to decide if you want to give up your favorite name over it. I’ve found I can say it in a sing-song way that makes me think it’s definitely not going to work (CHAR-lee-ASH-lee WERT-man), OR I can adjust the way I say it a little to make it completely fine: “Hi! My name is Charlie [pause, then mush the surname together] AshleighWERTman.” Or he could introduce himself this way: “Hi, I’m Charles Ashleigh-Wertman! Call me Charlie!”

Let’s move on to Arthur. I’m dismissing the airplane ticket concerns completely. As you say, surely fathers and sons with the same name have traveled together and have not been prevented from flying, and each ticket has its own code number. If you have a boy AND you use Arthur AND you are buying airplane tickets, I would suggest explaining the issue at the time of purchase and asking the airline what you should do to make that part of the boarding process easier and less confusing for airline employees.

Arthur does sound a little like your name, but as with the repeating -lie/-leigh issue, I think only you can decide if this bugs you enough to give up the name. If you prefer Charles anyway, using Arthur as the middle name or saving it for a possible future son seems like an excellent plan.

My other primary association with the name Arthur is King Arthur. You could play that up a bit to diminish the aardvark-only association.

And finally, William. I have heard of people using Wills as a nickname. For a baby, Baby Will or Baby William seems like a natural nickname. And I found with my own babies that other nicknames just emerged on their own: we spent a lot of time calling a baby Sweetymuffin and Bippy-Louise and Pluffybuns and Froggypants, and by the time those names sounded wrong, the child was old enough for more classroom-friendly nicknames. As long as you’ve got Will ready for later on it sounds like you’re all set.

I don’t think I’d use Charles and William in the same sibling group, because of the strong association I have with the royals. But the two names are great together, and I wouldn’t feel at all critical of a family that DID decide to use them together (or who used, say, Charles and Elizabeth, which should have the same level of association for me but somehow don’t); it’s not as if the names belong exclusively to the royal family.

It sounds to me as if you like the name Charles best, and that Charles is the name that best meets your preferences and priorities. Beyond that, all of your questions are questions you have to find your own answers to: they’re all issues of personal taste, so my answers aren’t necessarily going to be the same as yours. Do YOU mind the repeating -lie/-leigh sound? Do YOU mind the problems with making Charles possessive? Do YOU mind the popularity of William? Do YOU want to use both Charles and Arthur as first names or do you want to work on finding new middle names? You’re definitely on the right track to be considering these questions, but another person’s answers might increase the uncertainty rather than decreasing it. If it helps, I’ll say this: not one single issue you raised sounds like a deal-breaker to me. Every single one of them seems like an issue where you could think it over, decide what you think, and go with that. And at this point, that seems like a good idea: instead of agitating over all the issues, think to yourself “Which of the three names do I LIKE BEST?”

 
Name update! A. writes:

You and your readers helped us tremendously with our naming decision for our baby, who was born March 18. I had written to you last May to ask about the etiquette around using a middle name inspired by one of my students’ nicknames. I then wrote to you in November (after I was actually pregnant) to ask about some concerns I had with our finalist boy names. The advice we got from these requests was really helpful. We were going to decide between Margaret Linne@ and Ele@nor Verne for a girl — depending on what seemed to suit her best — and had settled on some undecided combination of Charles, Arthur, Gregory or “something else” if it was a boy (most likely going with Ch@rles Arthur).

We had a girl and it actually took awhile to name her. Within a few minutes of her birth, my husband had formed an opinion and asked me if I’d formed one yet. I’d barely gotten a look at her face yet and so I hadn’t! Besides, when he got back from the warming area where they weighed her, he said he was already leaning in the other direction.

It was a VERY difficult decision, but we eventually decided that she looked more like a Margaret than an Eleanor. And even though we brought her home on the vernal equinox and I still feel some residual “but it would have been so perfect!” feelings about Ele@nor Verne, we went with the name that seemed to fit her best.

Many thanks! I am hoping that I may someday have another daughter who will feel more like an Eleanor. They’d make a great sister pair!