When my partner wanted to name her daughter, she went back to the early records of the Sydney Hospital to find something euphonious, classic and unusual. My niece now has the same fore and middle names; my sister claims it was an accident but I bet she heard it and stashed it away.

But my niece has another child in her class with exactly the same combination of names. And there are a heap of them on MySpace. And a woman who was named the same only two years after my partner’s child has just been charged with killing her baby in Adelaide.

According to the WSJ, Americans are becoming increasingly anxious about their child’s names. They google possibilities, only to discover that the good ones are shared with vast breasted porn stars. Or (in the case of my own particular namesake) charged with grisly murders in a country with a vigorous newspaper tradition.

Baby-naming websites are fabulously popular, and you can hire consultants to provide options. And test them for whatever numerological nuttiness possessed you to get pregnant on the ninth floor of number nine, Calle Nine… etc.

“Lisa and Jon Stone of Lynnwood, Wash., turned to a name consultant because they didn’t want their son to be “one of five Ashtons in the class,” says Mrs. Stone, 36, a graphic designer. For Mr. Stone, 37, a production director for a nonprofit arts organization, the challenge was to find a “cool” name that would help his son stand out. “An unusual name gets people’s attention when you’re searching for a job or you’re one in a field of many,” he says.”

They went through Greene, Finn and Flynn, but were always disturbed by the weight of the Stone word on the back. With a consultant, they chose Evander. Well, actually the full name is Evander Jet Stone. A textbook on mineralogy might have helped.

As you would expect, the branding consultants have been called in, to provide names that stand out just that little bit, or will “look good on a marquee or political poster” (to quote one doting family obviously wanting young Jackson to move into the White House) or carry some other enticing underhand connection.

“We live in a marketing-oriented society,” says Bruce Lansky, a former advertising executive and author of eight books on baby names, including “100,000 + Baby Names.” “People who understand branding know that when you pick the right name, you’re giving your child a head start.”

No-one seems to think about family names. To students of organised crime, the name “Lansky” has irresistible connotations.

Brand experts name other peoples’ stuff, and make money by cutting through their clients’ sentimentality. It is a bit tougher when they are thinking of branding their own offspring.

“Even parents who are professional name consultants say the decision can be wrenching. As one of the founders of Catchword, a corporate naming firm with offices in New York and Oakland, Calif., Burt Alper says he and his wife, Jennifer, who also works in marketing, felt “tons of pressure” to come up with something grabby.

Although Mr. Alper typically gives clients a list of 2,000 names to mull over, he says he kept the list of baby names to 500, for simplicity. In the end, they named their daughter Sheridan, a family name Mr. Alper liked because of its “nice crisp syllables.” They chose Beckett for their six-month-old son, a name the Alpers thought sounded reliable and stable.

“That C-K sound is very well regarded in corporate circles,” Mr. Alper says, giving Kodak and Coca-Cola as examples. “The hard stop forces you to accentuate the syllable in a way that draws attention to it.”

If you are of a literary bent, you might think the name Beckett calls a bit of attention to itself too. In a very, very depressing kind of way. (I bet they don’t know they named both their children after playwrights. If they had gone for the middle names of these scribes, they would have ended up with Barclay and Brinsley, which at least sounds more like a bank than a bunch of bedsheets. Now, of course, Google will faithfully record this shabby piece of mockery.)

The picture shows a person known only as “the giant boy” exhibited at Bartholomew Fair in 1825. Maybe his parents were really indecisive.

The article is fun; from Aldaily.

(“Pilot Inspektor Riesgraf-Lee” is a real kid’s name. His father is an actor and scientologist. I don’t know his mother’s excuse.)

——

The word “euphonious” crept into the post, to my delight. The name “Euphonia” could be the absolute worst possible in this age of telephonic ubiquity. Google tells us this is a rare forename, though the Euphonia of 1800 must have been a bit perturbed when marriage turned her into Euphonia Snipe, since both are kinds of bird.

A euphonia is also a strange mechanical device. In 1791, Wolfgang von Kempelen built a machine that artificially created the sounds of speech. It was huge, complicated and clunky, but presumably useful if something happened to your throat, and you could sit at a machine that looked like a cross between a carpet loom, a typewriter and an ambitious zither. A version made fifty years later looked like this -

Joseph Faber’s “Euphonia”, as shown in London in 1846. The machine produced not only ordinary and whispered speech, but it also sang the anthem “God Save the Queen”.

The purpose of the human face lying on the table is unknown.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 8:03 pm and is filed under entertainments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.