Journalist and New York City mom Laura Dunphy reports that the pressure is on for Gotham parents to choose baby names that are more creative, more unusual, cooler than those anyone else is using. But no matter how hard you try, you still might not make it.

Ah, New York, New York.  If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.  And if you can name your baby here without needing therapy or Xanax, then I applaud you.

That’s because like everything else in NYC, baby naming is intense.  If most people think naming children is a pleasant activity, like badminton or a picnic, Manhattanites treat it as a competitive sport, like rugby or bond trading.

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When the mother of all hipster mommy bloggers, Heather Armstrong aka Dooce, named her second daughter Marlo, all I could think was…..Marlo? Really?  You’d have to work hard to find a less hipsterish name, and Dooce herself has said she was inspired to choose the name by its original bearer, That Girl actress and Free to Be You and Me author Marlo Thomas, not exactly a hipster icon.

So I was thinking about how true hipsters would by definition search for names that were not pegged as hipster, when I came across a nameberry forum launched by the ever-brilliant Susan Chesney, called Outhip the Hipsters.

“What names are even more edgy and nerdy-cool than the Hipster List?,” Susan writes in the introduction to her thread.  Rule #1, says Susan: The names on the Outhip the Hipsters list cannot be on the Hipsters list or be enthusiastically endorsed on Nameberry.

Over the next 50 posts, dozens of the nameberry resident geniuses added their own entries to the Outhip the Hipsters list.  I’ve reclassified many of the name suggestions below, plus added some of my own.

Here, names that may Outhip the Hipsters:

RISING HIPSTER NAMES

The choices below are rising quickly through the hipster ranks and may soon be so hip they’re not hip anymore.

girls

Agatha

Dorothy

Freya

Fuchsia

Gwen

Louise

Magdalene

Mildred

Muriel

Pauline

Ramona

Roxanne

Ruth

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One thing we learned when we wrote about hipster baby names is that nobody wants one.  Many people were horrified if they found their favorite names — or worse, their actual children’s names — on our list of hipster names.   No matter how much they’d loved the name before, they immediately went in search of something new, something different, something with a bit less of the whiff of hipsterdom about it.

Well, okay.  We can dig grok understand that.  It’s intrinsically uncool to be seen as trying hard to be cool, even if you’re doing so by deliberately being uncool.  Which, of course, is uncool.

We wrote about this before, in our exploration of names that hit the baby name sweet spot between too cool and not cool enough.

Today we look at how to downshift the hipster factor in some of the prime suspect names.  Making a name less hip might mean making it more classic or plainer, but it also might mean making it more unusual, less obviously stylish.  If you truly want to pull back from the edge of cool, consider making the following swaps.

Instead of Ada, try AIDEEN

Instead of Annabel, try ANNE

Instead of August, try GUSTAV

Instead of Butch, try BUDDY

Instead of Delilah, try SALOME

Instead of Edie, try EDITH

Instead of Hugo, try HUGH

Instead of Iris, try IRENE

Instead of June, try JANE

Instead of Kingston, try KINGSLEY

Instead of Lennon, try JOHN

Instead of Lulu, try LOUISE

Instead of Mae, try MARY

Instead of Miles, try BASIE  (I think Basie is probably pretty hipster too, but I just like it better)

Instead of Minnie, try MINETTE

Instead of Otis, try OMAR

Instead of Piper, try FIFER

Instead of Ray, try RALPH

Instead of Ruby, try RUTH

Instead of Talullah, try TABITHA

Instead of Theo, try TED

Any more bright ideas?  We know you have some…..