My wife, Charlotte, said earnestly at lunch today that the worst part of being pregnant is choosing names. We both have similar ideas about this. We don’t want to go for anything in the “Top 50” as we’d like our children to feel unique and special while they’re growing up. When I was at school there was nobody else called Luke. At the time I wasn’t sure I liked it but now I’ve got used to it and actually like being one of the only Luke’s of my age. In fact I don’t remember coming across many others with my name at all when I was young.

So we’re now going through the process of choosing names for our twins. Not yet knowing the gender of them means we have to select our top four boys’ names as well as our top four girls’ names just in case we have two boys or two girls. We had a challenge choosing Monty’s name and surprised a few people when we christened him “Monty Joe”. We often get asked what Monty is short for and we reply saying that it’s not short for anything – it’s just Monty. No point in giving him a name if it’ll just get abbreviated later on, we thought, so we did it for him.

So today I stopped in a bookshop and looked through the baby book section to find a book on names. And there were loads of them, several written by authors who seem to be very well known experts in the world of names. I nearly bought one for £8.99 which gave detailed descriptions of names and their origins. But in that copy there were only 5,000 names listed whereas I secured what I consider to be an absolute bargain when for a mere £6.99 I found a heavyweight volume called 40,001 Best Baby Names (as if there’s a Worst Baby Names volume). Advertised as “the one-stop baby-naming shop” and at just over a tenth of a penny per name I felt this represented the kind of superb value I just couldn’t walk away from.

The book thoughtfully provides a definition for each name together with variations on the spelling. There is also a section early on with several lists of suggested names including: Girl names for children of lesbians and gays (e.g. Celeste, Darcy, Pia and Ramona), Over the top boy names to avoid (e.g. Attila, Caesar, Lancelot and Rambo), Macho names (e.g. Bucko, Rip, Zoom and Spike), Exotic names for your baby girl (e.g. Cheyenne, Phyllida, Saffron and Sheba) plus many many more (as they say).

So it looks like Charlotte and I have a lot of reading (and probably laughing) to do over the coming months. Our definite no-no’s will appear here in due course. We’ve agreed that we’ll only include names we both really like. And because of that, sadly, Kermit has already been struck off my list. Happily though, Scooby is still in with a shout.

Share This