On names

My daughter just uttered this piece of wisdom: "All Nicks are the same, but Nicholases are really different."

You know something? I think she's right about that. I often wonder if she would have turned out to be a very different little girl if we had named her Erin, which was my original preference, or Virginia, which was my ex-husband's. She doesn't look at all like a Virginia, as far as I'm concerned. That would have been all wrong. Erin might have done, though. She's very Erin-like.

That one got dismissed as a possibility early on, though, because apparently my ex had known an Erin he had disliked.

Which is the problem when it comes to choosing your child's name. Frequently either one or the other of you has a bad association with a name, and so it's no longer a worthy member of the pool. Our choice of Madeleine, as it turns out, made it only by the merest brush of luck: my ex's first ex, if you follow me, had had a little girl after their divorce, whom she'd also already named Madeleine. If we'd known that, we'd have had to choose something else. And thus our poor little girl would have been stuck with some leftover, cast-off name that hadn't yet been tarnished by someone else's bad behavior.

There are quite a few once-worthy names that have now been blacklisted for posterity: Adolph, Napoleon, Lucrezia. It just takes the merest turn of bad luck to turn your good-fortune name into a serious burden. Sometimes you can do a bit to fix them--you can insist on being called Nicholas rather than Nick--but sometimes you can't do anything at all.

So I often wonder who I'd be if my parents had decided to name me Jennifer instead. I spent the first six years of my life yearning to be a Jennifer--or maybe Esmerelda, like in Bewitched--mostly because it was multisyllabic. I really wanted a multisyllabic name. The more syllables the better. Multiple syllables just sounded more princessy to me, and of course I really, really wanted to be a princess.

But I don't think I turned out anything like a Jennifer, so it's just as well my parents knew better.