JILL BARNETT turns her sharp eye and keen name sensibility on names that you love but just, because of bad associations, can never use.

As a style-conscious four-year-old who knew that lime green bellbottoms and patchwork Holly Hobby skirts were cutting edge chic, I had recently grown tired of my boring shoulder-length locks. Unable to think of any glamorous looks aside from a pageboy, life took a seemingly fortuitous turn one day when my mom took me to Friendly’s for a five-star grilled cheese sandwich and fries. Our server’s name was Claire, and in addition to having a name I absolutely loved, she sported my dream hairstyle at the time: a ponytail in the back with feathered chunks of hair resembling earmuffs on the sides, likely held in place with a jug or so of glistening Aqua Net.

After returning home from lunch, I did what any logical preschooler in need of a classy coiffure would have done: I found a pair of scissors, crawled up onto my bathroom counter so I could be closer to the mirror, and tried my best to recreate the glory of Claire’s ravishing 70’s hairdo. Becoming a hairstylist clearly wasn’t in my future, however, because I somehow managed to give myself a raging reverse mullet, complete with a multitude of stray vertical tufts.

In a panic, my mom quickly took me to the hairdresser, who was thankfully able to even out the ends, but for a good three months, my hair resembled a cross between Austin Powers and Friar Tuck. To this day, while I love the name Claire, I sadly know I can’t bestow it upon a future daughter because it’s too connected to my childhood hair trauma, and because I’ve long since referred to my unfortunate bowl cut as “The Claire.”

And while Claire was the first gorgeous name I realized I could no longer use due to a negative association, it unfortunately wasn’t the last. Please join me in paying tribute to some of my favorite names that have committed the dreaded crime of guilt by association:

ALICE: As I was paying my bill at a diner, a customer approached the woman named Alice who was working behind the cash register, politely saying, “Exuse me, ma’am. My turkey sandwich doesn’t taste right. I think it’s spoiled.” Not missing a beat, the woman, who had used self-tanner to the point of resembling an Oompa Loompa, grabbed the man’s sandwich from his plate, took a huge bite out of it, and said with a snarl and a mouth filled with food, “It tastes fine to me!” Clearly hoping to be named Employee of the Month, the woman returned the sandwich to the customer as he stood in disbelief, and then promptly shooed him on his way.

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Guest blogger Jennifer Maselli finds herself nursing Baby Name Fever, and the only (elusive) cure is the perfect name.

Since finding out that our third and final child – due this fall – is a girl, I have become afflicted with something I like to call “Baby Name Fever.” I’ve been hit with The Fever before, but never quite this hard. Because this will be our last baby, I feel an urgency, a great pressure, to find the right name for her.

It’s made me a little crazy.

I’ve started carrying baby name books around with me wherever I go so that I can look up names whenever they pop into my head.

“But officer, I wasn’t talking on my cell phone. I was looking up “Keturah” in this baby name book.”

“Step out of the car, ma’am.”

“But I need to know what it means!”

I spend hours trolling the Internet, reading all the name blogs and boards, obsessively digging through the Social Security website and the London Telegraph baby announcements.

“Mommy, when are you going to get off the computer? I’m hungry.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“You said that 3 hours ago!”

I’ve begged my friends to please release their reserved baby names back into the general population so that I can use them.

“I know Frances was your dead grandmother’s name, but do you mind if I use it?”

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Novelist Christina Baker Kline, whose wonderful new book Bird in Hand comes out this week, writes about how even someone who names fictional people for a living can make mistakes when naming real live babies.  Like when she named her three sons: Eli, his brother William, and his other brother William.

You’d think that someone who spends her days creating and naming characters might have gotten the hang of it by the time she had to name some actual humans.  That’s what I thought, at least.  In fact, I was rather smug about it.  A novelist spends a lot of time, over the course of writing 300 pages, with the characters she names, so you learn to choose carefully.

Names can instantly reveal a person’s class, age, social standing, and even race. They have positive and negative connotations. And the wrong name can be disastrous. For example, a friend of mine named Brandy is an award-winning journalist who has had to battle people’s preconceptions all her life about her name.  I would never do that to a character!

So why did I do it to my kids?

(I‘m charitably saying “I,” but for the record my husband was an equal and willing partner in this.)

We named our firstborn William Hayden Baker Kline (yes, four names – bear with me), after my father, William Baker, and a whole lot of Hadens — we added the “y” — in my husband’s family tree. We signed the birth certificate, sent out printed announcements, and received everything from picture frames to baby rattles to blankets with “William Hayden” and his birthdate inscribed.

But over the next few weeks, we began to second-guess.  This child was round and jolly, with curly red hair: a baby leprechaun.  The princely name of William just didn’t fit.  But Hayden – yes!  He was definitely a Hayden, a hobbity child of the heather-grown hills.  It was the perfect name for him, and, we thought, relatively undiscovered.

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