November 2005

Please, just spell it right

by Lindsay Thompson

“Boys’ names are so hard, because they’re really overused like John or Michael, or they’re grandpa names like Horace and Frank,” she said. “We kind of like to walk the line of being slightly unique, but not too weird . . . . We thought, ‘That’s unique, and it’s not too weird,’ said Topping . . . “Now, it’s too common.”

— Parents Gretchen and Allen Topping of Edmonds, on the thought process behind naming their son Kaden, only to find 114 other babies got the same moniker in 2004

Actor Nicolas Cage’s publicist has announced the actor and his wife have named their newborn son Kal-el, the birth name of comic book hero Superman.

— Press reports, October 2005

According to an October Seattle Post-Intelligencer story by Kristin Dizon, the art of naming babies is taking interesting turns. The Social Security Administration collects name data and each year publishes the favorite 100 birth names of the previous year, nationally and by state. You can look up the top 1,000 for every year back to 1880.

At the top, in Washington, it’s pretty much what you’d expect: Jacob and Emma; Ethan and Emily; Andrew and Olivia. But mid-rank and below you see the churning foam of parental creativity. Besides Kaden, last year’s variants included Aiden, Jayden, Hayden, and Braden. For girls, the rhymesters include Hailey, Kayley, and Bailey.

In 2000, Dizon reports, a religious country singer called Sonny Sandoval dubbed his new daughter Nevaeh — “Heaven” backwards. In 2001, 86 families followed suit, and last year, 3,134 girls joined the gathering throng: 99 in the Evergreen State.

Also, last year, 127 boys in Washington were named Ashton. Dude, what were my parents thinking?

Which is, of course, the question. At my college graduation, the dean announced he was about to read out the names of the graduates. “I am sure I will mispronounce some names,” he anticipated. “I am doing my best. You gave them to your children.” Writer Edmund Crispin, in a Gervase Fen mystery novel, featured a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bust. Their kids were named Anna May and John Will. “They were not the sort of people for whom a joke quickly lost its first freshness,” Fen remarked.

At the same time, the idea that anyone in America would name a child Semaj (James, doing the backwards thing again) brings a certain closure to my own longstanding nomenclatural ambivalence.

Traditionalists both, my parents named me after their fathers, Lindsay Wister Comer and Cicero Taylor Thompson. Talk about a gold-plated, $20 name for a kid in small-town North Carolina 50 years ago. And unique: I checked SSA’s website and found the most popular year recorded for Lindsay was 1893 — the year my grandfather was born, when it ranked 397th in the top thousand. Since then it has languished between 600 and the mid 900s. There have been 63 years since 1880 that it didn’t make the Top 1,000 at all (and Cicero dropped off the list entirely in 1910). The Lindsay birth class of ’55 was all of 614 in a nation of 165 million.

I’m not even sure my grandfathers liked their names very much. One signed his name “L.W. Comer” and went by Wister; the other was “C.T.” in all seasons. Although my grandfather Thompson died in 1947, I feel a psychic link with him: the dread anticipation of having our names read out, in full, every year in grade school at roll call.

I’ve always suspected Grandfather Thompson was trying to push the pendulum back the other way when he named my father Tommy Jack: a perfectly normal small-town Texas sort of name. And it fit: my dad was effortlessly popular, handsome, a business and civic leader — you name it — his whole life. But in childhood I discovered he really disliked his name. Too informal, he said. He signed himself T.J. Thompson and went by Tommy, which most people used as a nickname in the way all Gibsons back then were Hoot and all Rhodeses were Dusty.

So along I come in 1955, and Margaret and Tommy apparently give the pendulum their own shove, with Lindsay Taylor Thompson.

I have found it a name to grow into, even as I find, year in and year out, a surprising number of folks can’t tell whether it’s coming or going and call me Mr. Lindsay. But at least I’ll never be misplaced in the nursing home. I’ll be out on the porch, snuffling chuckles, as the attendants try to sort out the serried ranks of Brandis, Brittanys, Angelinas and Ashtons, Kadens and Codys, Samaras, Trinitys, and Semajes.

Call me Yasdnil.  

For personal correspondence, Lindsay Thompson can be reached at tradelaw@hotmail.com. E-mail letters to the editor to letterstotheeditor@wsba.org or mail to WSBA, Attn: Letters to the Editor, 2101 Fourth Ave., Ste. 400, Seattle, WA 98121-2330.