Salandriagado wrote:Ghost Land wrote:It's good to see someone young still like those traditional names. I can actually see myself hypothetically having sons Tony and Vinnie, and a daughter Katie.
Um...how? What's racist about naming your kid Larry?
The racist part is having a list of "acceptable" names and declaring all other names (including, say, literally all traditional names from cultures that are not Western European) as unacceptable.
Except that I never said everybody ought to have a name picked from my small, incomplete list. You're jumping
waaaay too far to a conclusion here. If you're of Hispanic descent and want to name your kid Carlos or Juan or Guadalupe, go the fuck ahead! Nobody's stopping you. I certainly won't; even subjectively they have a lot of awesome names! If you're of Japanese descent and want to name your kid Haruto or Honoka (the most popular names in Japan as of 2020), go ahead; who's stopping you? And so on and so forth. Show me where I ever said that everybody should be picking names from the small list I provided. Just because those are the names I like best doesn't mean I'd be in favor of mandating everybody's name be picked from that small pool; besides, it would be pretty boring if the name distribution were, say, 25% John, 20% Larry, 20% Dave, 15% Steve, 10% Mike, 5% Chris, and 5% Brad.
The names I'm taking issue with are the overly cutesy, tacky, trendy names people give their kids now thinking it sounds cool or cute now, but will be a pain in the ass later in life due to problems with spelling, pronunciation, or just the embarrassment of having to walk up to people and tell them, "Hi, my name is
Beautiful." A made-up name or completely contrived spelling of a different, legitimate name is "traditional" to exactly nobody. Ever wonder why you won't come across a 40-year-old woman, or let alone a 75-year-old woman, named "Nevaeh"? Because plain and simple, that wasn't a name then!
Case in point: I actually really do like the name Caitlin. It's a good Irish name and I'd imagine it was pretty refreshing to hear something different in the 70s and 80s when that name first became popular. In America by the 70s it was already starting to be pronounced the way it looks (as opposed to the original Irish pronunciation which is incidentally where we get the name Kathleen from, and seems kind of counterintuitive to Americans with no ties to Ireland). So that's where we got phonetically-spelled variants like Katelyn - which I can completely understand the emergence of. But by the time that name peaked in popularity in the late 90s, there were so many weird variant spellings that a Caitlin of any form now is going to have to spend her entire life having to spell it out for people letter-by-letter, and some of these variant spellings look quite frankly ridiculous! There's been way too much focus on trying to be "youneek" and "kre8yv" without regard for how the bearer of that name is going to feel about it for the rest of his or her life.
Posted: Wed Aug 04, 2021 12:53 pm
