Name Calling

So, as of today, my Trophy Wife™ and I have just a few more days of he/she’s before we learn which pronoun we’ll be using from now on when it comes to COUCH (Cluster of Unidentified Cells Hughey).  That’s the day that we will go back to the Ultrasound tech, who will plant a jelly-coated piece of tech on my Trophy Wife’s stomach and then translate the blobs and globules we see, sort of like a reverse Rorschach test.  Or, I guess, a little like reading tea leaves… she’ll point out that this little area here is actually a leg, when after looking at it closely, we were pretty sure it was a coffee stain.

The more dangerous side to this is the fact that now that we’re coming to know what sex Couch will be, the next step will be picking out a name.  This worries me for a couple reasons:

1)      I’ve gotten kind of used to calling COUCH… well, COUCH.  I realize that’s not a name to fall in love with (and as anyone with a degree in interior design will tell you, SOFA is a much classier name, anyway), but there’s a comfort with familiarity that makes it hard to give up.  My wife worries about what will happen to her post-partum.  I worry about what will happen to me post-name-um.

2)     If my Trophy Wife™ and I almost start small, sarcastic, surgical air assaults over drapery styles, I fear for what may happen with something as huge as the name of our child.

This is a slight exaggeration for effect, I should point out.  For one thing, our disagreements are more like small, sarcastic limited police actions. 

For another, the honest truth is that we both see eye to eye on a great deal more than we don’t, which helps explain why we’re, say, married.  We like similar music, similar art, and have generally similar political/socio-economic/religious views (None/Socio-what?/Feel free to have your own, and don’t preach to us about them or we’ll be forced to resort to snarkiness). We both love to work on art and craft projects and neither of us ever have enough time to do either.  We both like to spend time in the kitchen, and we don’t mind a lively debate as long as it doesn’t get too strident or too pointed.  We both have discovered, to our immense regret, that we would rather smash our head through razor-wire wrapped panes of plate glass than be subjected to some of the children’s/teens programming the kids insist on watching on TV (sometimes watching the same episodes multiple times).  Oh, and we’re both never wrong.  Even when logic, cold fact, public opinion and Wikipedia have all proven otherwise. 

Even so, the name thing has me a little worried at the outset.  I mean, I name my tropical fish, true… but most tropical fish have a couple years or so of life to them—or in my tanks, one to two months of glorious (and sometimes vaguely overfed) happiness and water changes before cardiac arrest and eventual toilet flushing, apparently—so if I name a fish badly, it’s not like they’ll be hearing it long, anyway.  And it’s not like they’ll respond to it in the first place.  They’ll come up for food once they’ve been conditioned to understand that “Big man in room that opens lid = food” and “Women in room that pays us no mind = no food”.  And once that happens, they’ll come up to the surface whether I call them by name or politely whisper a string of alliterative profanities.  (This would be, by the way, reason #382 Why Fish Are the Best Pets, Ever… because they are so low-maintenance that you often forget they’re there, and that’s fine, because they often forget you’re there, too.)

But a child?

Hoo-boy.  You’re saddling a kid with a name that they’ll be carrying for their entire life.   The name you give to your child may have everything to do with whether they’ll be keeping their lunch money ten to fifteen years down the line.  It may even have a lot to do with whether they get a job they want or get married to the person they want.  I mean, hell, it’s a responsibility.  If you foul it up and fall in love with a name like Eustace or Abercrombie or Spot, and you deck your kid out with that, you might as well shell out for the therapy when you do it.  Cause they’ll need it.  And then you’ll need it, because you can’t understand why the hell your darling child wishes you’d die a tragically ironic death at the hands of a serial engraver and his etching pen.

So this was a task we’d started to undertake—to find a perfect name for COUCH.  And it’s a task I feel I could be pretty competent at.  I’m a fiction writer, off and on, and everyone will tell you that a character name is deathly important: Scarlett O’Hara, Sam Spade and Holly Golightly wouldn’t have the same ‘name’ impact if they were Sandra Grey or Jim Smith.  I know this, so I often obsess over my character names… they’re not right until I say they’re right.  And being a sometimes-fiction writer, there were names that I naturally gravitated to.

Unfortunately, I’m a sometimes historical-fiction writer, so I was told that the first fifteen names on my list were right out because they were horribly outdated.  And that makes me a little sad, because Aethelred Hughey and Osbert Hughey both actually have nice rings to them. 

Shortly after that, we decided that for the sake of both our sanities, we may have been better off setting up a few ground rules when it came to our name choices.

First off, no weird-ass spellings for the sheer sake of weird-ass spellings.  This probably came about simply because I suggested that we could name our child whatever we wanted and just spell it “X” so he or she would be able to spell his or her name by six months old and therefore certifiably be a genius.  At any rate, it’s a good rule.  Do we have to teach an already-laughably-illiterate world that we can’t spell Michelle, so instead we named her MyShell?  If we’re going with a traditional name, we can go with a traditional spelling, like traditional people.  If a progressive spelling means “a wrong or excessively and badly phonetic spelling,” then we can be old-fashioned and staid just fine, thank you.

Next, no apostrophes for the sake of apostrophes.  Yeah, and My’Shell isn’t any better.  Nor is M’ark J’unior, Christ’pher or Qapla’.  Speaking of…

No names that sound like we threw syllables in a hat and pulled them out randomly to come up with something.  We’re not gonna have a child named Hibniquiwa or Korlerea’sha just because it’s unique.   Our child will have plenty of other opportunities to show his or her uniqueness without it being because their name sounds like Mom and Dad were binge-drinking when they came up with it.

No names that come specifically from a foodstuff or marketable product of some sort.  I kid you not, when I was looking up names, I was looking on a name site for some slightly unusual ones (My Trophy Wife™ and I both like the idea of somewhat nontraditional, somewhat esoteric names for girls, like Hope, Sierra, Ember, Coda and Destiny) when I came across a name that jumped out: Courvoisier.  Really?  So, what, you’d name your kid after the drink that led to them being conceived?  If you didn’t have money for the good stuff, did you name them Thunderbird?  What the fuck.   Thank god I didn’t have that couple for parents.  “And this is our oldest, Courvoisier, and the twins Löwenbräu and Schlitz.  …Yeah, we lost a lot of money in the stock market crash.”  

(Note to really young people: Löwenbräu and Schlitz were what we old people sometimes call beers.  Beers are generally low-alcohol-content drinks that often taste slightly better than piss but are worth it because you tend to feel happier when you have one in your hand.  This effect is reasonably similar to what you do nowadays with whole smoking bath salts and then going out and eating people’s faces thing, only a little more restrained.)

No names that will give everyone else unreasonable expectations of our child or just sets him or her up for failure.  Look, I love Peyton Manning… even now that he’s traded, I’m going to root for him when he plays anyone but my home team, which happens to be his old team.   And when he goes into the Colts’ ring of honor and the Hall of Fame, I’m going to be there beaming with pride as though it were me.  But if we have a son, there is no way in fuck I would name him Peyton.  Not because it’s a bad name—it’s not, and I rather like it!—but because immediately, there’s a huge heap of expectations on his not quite fully-developed shoulders.  He’s either going to be the next big quarterback at his school, or he won’t and will be an utterly miserable failure, working the late shift at McDonalds, and selling homemade porn videos on the side to help fund his dope addiction.  That’s what having the expectations of a name can do to you.  No Peyton Manning Hughey, no John Kennedy Hughey, no Martin Luther Hughey, no Bruce Wayne Hughey (Sorry, Angie). 

No names taken from fictional characters that either of us would like to take into a dark alley and beat to death with a cudgel.  To be fair, that mostly boils down to any names from Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey, though, so we’re probably safe. 

So what are we left with?  Something like several million.  At least, that’s what it feels like.  Fable (girl) and Cade (boy) are two that I like personally, but there’s a few hundred books and an awful lot of possible police action left before we come up with a definite winner. 

At least, in a few days, we get to cut that down by about half.  

Thank God.