For years, it was my dirty little secret. I had special paper: lined white pads with no margins or holes down the left side. The pens had to be just so too, heavy black or blue fountain pens like we used in Catholic school. I needed two decks of cards, shuffled together. And my name lists, that was the most important thing.

I called it Writing Names, and the only people who knew I did it, my parents and my younger brother, teased me mercilessly about it. It was weird, they said, crazy even. And so I kept it secret from the rest of the world, not only when I was ten and eleven and twelve but for years afterward.

I was seriously unpopular during that time, too old to race around on bikes or play house in the woods, but too young to be so ashamed of my name obsession that I’d give it up. After school and through long summer days, I’d get out my paper and my cards and my lists and I’d settle in for hours alone with my Name Game.

Here’s how it worked: I had four lists of 144 names each – girls’ names, boys’ names, last names, and place names. The names on the lists were each keyed to a pair of cards: ace-two might equal Barbara, say, or eight-three Joseph. I’d shuffle my cards, divide them into two equal piles, and then turn over the first pair, which would indicate the fathers’ name in the family I was inventing. Then mom and last name. (more…)

Beyond Ava & Aiden hits the bookstores today,  the first complete all-new edition of our landmark book, Beyond Jennifer & Jason, totally revised from beginning to end, with a brand new title and lots of brand new features.

Like what?  To recapture the freshness, lightness, humor and user-friendliness of the original, we went back to our basic four-part structure of Style, Image, Sex and Tradition.  Out went the Popularity section, since so much of that information is now accessible instantly online.

We’ve added fresh advice and approaches to the challenges of naming a daughter and naming a son, new categories like Green Names, Powerboys and Metrodudes, Baby Gods and Goddesses, and Mixed-Marriage Names–hundreds of the kind of subjective lists we invented, pointing out not only current trends, but where they come from and where they’re going.

Finding the right name for our baby was a major challenge.  (The naming of The Baby Name Bible had been such a torturous process that we documented our struggle in an article in Publishers Weekly magazine.

We knew it was time to let go of our original title, since Jennifer and Jason are now the parents of the new generation of babies.  But which alliterative pairing to choose?  Among the many considered and rejected: Beyond Emily & Ethan, Beyond Addison & Aiden, Beyond Adam & Eva, Beyond Jayden & Jada, Beyond Miley & Max.

And then the latest popularity lists decided for us, with Ava and Aiden pulling ahead of all their trendy compatriots to become the Jennifer and Jason of today.

We can’t wait to hear what you think of the result.  And to give you more of a taste of what’s in the new book, we’ll be  posting excerpts every Friday through the summer, starting this week.

One of the great mysteries of baby-naming is how a name comes seemingly out of nowhere to become a fashionable, popular choice.

Finn is such a name.  When we wrote our first baby-naming book, Beyond Jennifer & Jason, 20 years ago, Finn appeared in exactly one place: As a So Far Out It’s In name, in the Irish surname category.

Finn has a lot going for it, starting with the very first inspiration for the name, the greatest hero of Irish mythology, Finn McCool.   How could a name not be cool with an ancestor like that?

But unlike other, far more complex Irish names, Finn has tremendous crossover potential.  It’s also kind of Scandinavian, sort of fishy, easy to spell and say, plus has several attractive relatives: Finnian, Finnegan, Finlay.

And it’s been chosen by such high profile couples as Ed Burns and Christy Turlington for their son, while Angie Harmon and Jason Sehorn named their daughter Finley, a version also chosen by Lisa Marie Presley for one of her newborn twin girls.

Once you dissect all that, it’s easy to see that Finn’s popularity hardly came from nowhere.  And it’s a name that’s unlikely to fade away again anytime soon.

For more names from Irish mythology, check out our new book, Cool Irish Names for Babies.

AND HAVE A HAPPY ST. PATRICK‘S DAY!

For some parents, a name’s literal meaning is one of the most significant factors in making their choice, specifically seeking out a name that denotes a quality like strength or calm or beauty or intelligence.  But the fact of the matter is that these desirable attributes are attached to only one segment of the name bank.  A large proportion of names are based on biblical character references or the arcane workings of the medieval feudal system or geographical features of an early bearer’s locale.  And so you find Avery meaning ‘ruler of the elves,’ Carson meaning ’son of the marsh dwellers,’ Benjamin ’son of the right hand’ and Brandon ‘broom-covered hill’–none of which has much relevence to a 21st century baby.

And then there are those with out-and-out derogatory meanings, such as Cameron (crooked nose), Campbell (crooked mouth), Portia (pig), Kennedy (misshapen head), Gulliver (glutton), Calvin (bald), Mallory (unlucky), and Miriam (bitter).  These extreme examples are the real litmus test as to feelings about whether names are destiny or self-fulfilling prophesies, and also whether you think a child might feel resentful about such a choice (”Did your really think I was gonna have a crooked mouth?”).  But judging by the widespread popularity of some of these names, these considerations have been by and large disregarded.

We have always thought  that, in making a choice,  the contemporary image of a name far outweighs its literal meaning, so that supposedly ‘unlucky’ Mallory trumps ‘gentle strength’ Mildred.  In fact, for a long time Pam and I  skirted the issue entirely.  In our ‘Beyond Jennifer & Jason‘ and ‘Cool Names’ books, which deal with style and trends and naming issues, there were no textbook meanings of names at all.  We finally surrendered to the requests of some of our readers when we compiled ‘The Baby Name Bible,’ with its 50,000+ names and their meanings–a gargantuan task, by the way.

So, how important is a name’s literal meaning to you?  We’d love to hear your comments on the subject below, or on the message boards.