By Pamela Redmond Satran

Have you heard of Warby Parker?  They’re the cool vintage=inspired online eyeglass company that launched a huge trend.  And now they’re joined by a host of other geek chic eyewear purveyors, including one for kids called Very French Gangsters, where we found our adorable glasses-wearing model.

But the real point here, as it always is on Nameberry, is names.

I was perusing the wares on Warby Parker the other day when I was distracted by the names of the frames.  Some embody a lot of geek but not much chic: Fillmore, Digby, and Duckworth. And then there are those like Sloan and Sawyer, Reynold and Larkin, which are chic without the geek.

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We don’t particularly think of Woody Allen as a cutting-edge filmmaker, but there is one area in which he has been—if unwittingly—prescient, and that is in giving some of his characters names that would later become trendy choices for babies.  (Though there are no babies in his films—children hardly exist in Woody’s World.)

For those characters he created for himself, he chose, with a few exceptions, pretty ordinary, sometimes nicknamey names—Alvy, Sandy, Mickey, Lenny, Larry, Jerry, Sid, Gabe, Sheldon, Isaac.  But for others, he did come up with some inspired choices:

Alfie—You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger, 2010 (Anthony Hopkins).  A fittingly British choice for a British character—but it’s doubtful if Woody knew that Alfie was the fourth most popular name for UK baby boys born in 2010.

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I love the concept of Guilty Pleasure Names — names you love but know you shouldn’t, either because they’re too crazy or too tacky, too high falutin’ or maybe too trashy.

Nameberry hosts several forums devoted to the concept of Guilty Pleasure Names.  Here’s one that focuses on GPNs for girls, while this one defines Guilty Pleasure Names as Names You Love But No One Seems To Like.

And then there are the User Lists devoted to Guilty Pleasure Names, from the Strange and Eccentric to the general interest.

My Guilty Pleasure Names range from the so-popular-I-know-I shouldn’t-love-them-but-I-do — Sophia, Elijah — to choices like Joe and Tom that I know are boring but adore anyway.

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There was a scene in an episode of this season’s Girls in which a guy asks Lena Dunham‘s character her name, and she commands him to guess.

“Uh….Daisy?” he says.

“Daisy?!? I WISH my name was Daisy!” replies the much-less-fancifully-named Hannah.

Which made us think, as many things do, of Nameberry and our Question of the Week.

What do you wish your name was?

It may not be your favorite name, the one you’d choose for a child.  But for whatever reason — and I hope you’ll tell us what that reason is — the name conveys how you’d like to be seen, who you wish others thought you were.

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