what’s in a name?
much to the disgust of a a few triplet mums, someone from another website perused through the triplet website, copied down the names of every member’s children, and proceeded to rate them into the following categories: the good, the bad, the trendy and the mundane.
there were a lot of ruffled feathers, as popular (emily, jack, ava, madison, ashley) are scorned there, ditto for names creatively spelt (myranda, keighlee). names starting with the first letter, or rhyming were pretty much flamed.
where did jasper, sela and carys fit in?
trendy.
can you imagine? i purposely chose names that i thought NOT to be trendy. you don’t see a lot of j, s or c’s running about the place. or at least i didn’t think you do. do you? trendy? i know catherine zeta jones named her daughter carys…but i didn’t think a lot of other people had. and sela, trendy?
one of the more honest triplet mums wrote that her feelings were hurt knowing that someone didn’t like her child’s name. but to be honest, probably a lot of people don’t like her child’s name.
not just her child, ANY child. i have lots of friends who have named a child something i wouldn’t. (obviously! i go for trendy names, apparently!)
but you know what? after you see and touch that child whose name you don’t really like, you don’t really think about the name, you think about the baby. that’s the way it is. i haven’t run across a baby called anything i find truly offensive like adolf, but i do think the theory would hold true even then.
the meanings behind our children’s names is very important to magnificent and me. apparently it is bad that i chose the welsh version of carys, instead of going with karis. but my grandfather used that welsh expression when he said goodnight to us…carys dunwell. my daugher’s name is carys.
jasper, he is precious. i am sorry there is a national park by the same name, and that some people think the name is red neck and others think it is posh.
sela – pause and reflect. the name after virtually every psalm. i love the meaning, i love the way her name floated in a room amongst the bleeping machines. rest now, sela. ssshhh shhh sela. when laying in the hospital ward trying to choose a name for her, we test run the names by speaking them aloud. sela. it gave me peace.
sebastian – the patron saint of soldiers. my grandfather was a soldier. and although some believe the name sebastian is too "snooty"…i have a tough time remembering that when he has collapsed in years into my arms, weeping because someone on the bus sat on the special drawing he had made for me.
i don’t think you can love someone and not love their name.
(someone said it doesn’t matter what their name is, it matters the tone you speak it in. that’s nice in theory, but if you had heard me bellowing CARYS! on the playground not 40 minutes ago, you would wonder….)
