"It's pronounced ahs-wee-pay!"

Steve Scott reckons most folks wouldn’t name their daughter Jezebel because of its association with a wicked woman in the Bible. I looked it up on ancestry.com, and it turns out that there are quite a few women named Jezebel, mostly Hispanic. It would be almost unthinkable for non-Hispanics to name a child Jesus, but Hispanics seem to have no qualms about it. I don’t know why Jesus is a taboo name in some ethnic categories, but I speculate that anyone named Jesus might be seen as uppity. It’s the same reason so few people are named Jehovah. There is a Jehovah H. Jesus listed in the Milwaukee directory, but I bet his parents didn’t name him that.

There aren’t many Satans or Lucifers running around, for obvious reasons, and we all recognize that names go in and out of fashion. When I was a kid, Debbies abounded. Now you’re more likely to run into a Tyler than a Debbie.

My ancestors used to adhere loosely to a naming convention in which the sons were named according to birth order after the paternal grandfather, the maternal grandfather, the father, and then up to great grandfathers and so on. Daughters were named for their maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, mother, and so on. Names would repeat over generations, and this is helpful in researching genealogy.

Nowadays parents seem to give no heed to family tradition and pick names with no family history. By chance alone, my names have antecedents among my ancestors. My folks didn’t know about these ancestors when they named me. In fact, I was named after Dennis the Menace because my father was reading the funny pages in the waiting room when I was born and thought Dennis the Menace was especially amusing that day. My parents had agreed on Christopher, so there was some bother about the last minute change, and neither of my parents ever called me Dennis much. My mother called me Christopher, and my father called me Toby, a nickname I abandoned after the miniseries roots caused me to be subjected to merciless ribbing that I should insist on “Kunta Kinte”.

I have heard folks talk about how they came up with names for their kids. In many cases it was a process of elimination. Names would have bad associations personal to the parents, and they couldn’t bring themselves to use them. For example, I reckon Penelope is a lovely name, but I can’t help associating it with a really mean fat girl who stabbed me in the hand with a pencil in the 6th grade. Mrs Vache Folle and I both have ancestors named Jemimah, and that would make a nice name for a daughter if we ever had one. The trouble is that Aunt Jemimah, the syrup huckster, has ruined the name for me.

I have a string of Nimrods in my ancestry (Audie Murphy had the same ancestors), but it would be tough to be named Nimrod these days. bk marcus explained this in a post last April. Bugs Bunny is to blame.

I favor the classics in naming myself. Give me a Mary, a Margaret or an Elizabeth any day over a Heather, a Tyler, or a Rhiannon. Of course, I’d have to call them Polly, Peggy or Patsy according to tradition.