what kinds of names get the most shit, and do you agree that it's deserved?
generally speaking no. there are a couple of exceptions which are universally agrees upon -- it isn't controversial to give shit to names that are going to make a child's life difficult because of some wacky youneeque spelling, for example, or a name that's offensive, inappropriate, or doesn't respect the child's autonomy as a real human and future adult. however, this last point varies from culture to culture, so i also see a lot of names getting shit for reasons that are entirely based in western racism and classism.
a brief summary of name groups i see get the most shit overall (because each of these points could run the entire blog for months and for that matter so could individual names within these groups):
i have real issue with how much i see this. non-irish, primarily americans, love how irish names sound but will constantly insult the spelling for being "weird", "making no sense", or trying to be unique/special. they fail to understand that irish names come from the irish language, a critically endangered language nearly destroyed by british colonialism, and they love to make them more "palatable" by spelling them phonetically in english so they "make sense." if you suggest giving your kid a correctly spelled irish name, they'll insist up and down that it'll be a burden akin to child abuse, because americans also seem to have a hatred of taking five seconds to teach the pronunciation of their names. it's very weird and tied up in a lot of biases and assumptions and centricisms that never fails to piss me the fuck off.
there's also a sub-class of these people who seem to think that they're being very worldly by adding the caveat "it's fine if you're going to raise your kid in ireland", as though irish people with irish names will only ever stay in ireland and only ever speak to irish people. what in the world.
unfortunately no surprise. a lot of people don't understand that many "weird" spelling choices or "unusual/unique" names are in fact layered in many generations of highly specific african-american culture. i see a lot of aspects of these naming conventions ridiculed, and at my most charitable i assume it's because when white people do it, it usually is for the mormonesque reason of wanting their kid to stand out, or wanting a pretty instagramable name. but despite what "progressive" white people think, equality does not mean african-americans, and black people as a whole, act perfectly like white people and then get treated as such. it means black people have their own black culture that's equally respected, and this extends to their naming conventions -- yes, becky, even when there's "weird" capitalisation, punctuation, or "unusual" virtue/quality name choices. the hostility immediately apparent when a name has a dash, apostrophe, or multiple capital components without a space is unreal, and the seething hatred of names that sound "ghetto" (i am not making this up; this is a FREQUENT debate i see on naming websites/forums) isn't even veiled racism.
there's also the same sub-class of allegedly worldly white folks who'll wring their hands and say "well... you just wouldn't want your child to be discriminated against when they enter the workforce... employers would differentiate between a resume from an ava and a resume from a la'toya" without an ounce of irony, somehow not realising that asking an entire culture to whitewash their naming practises instead of addressing discrimination in the workplace is an absolutely deranged take.
i will come out as a slight hater here -- i think some nature names are kind of dumb. if a person wants to choose those names for themselves when they're older i think it's cool as fuck, but putting it on a child who has no choice in the matter can sometimes wobble on the edge of what i can tolerate. however, overall, most nature names are inoffensive and have pleasant meanings, and are often easy to spell and pronounce as they're familiar. the worst i could say is they might read a little hippyish, but that's not a bad thing. like. there's worse your parents could be. (raging racists, for example.)
i actually have a specific example here. the name juniper. now, this is not my style at all. i don't particularly like this name, but it's strictly personal taste. there's honestly nothing wrong with it as a name. it's spelled fine, it's not too long, it flows well, it has a pleasant meaning. i can understand it not being to someone's taste but it's definitely not the worst name out there. however, the shit this name got. it got so much shit so constantly that one of the name communities i lurk on had to ban discussions about it because the thread would just derail into pro- and anti-juniper brigades slaughtering each other in an orgy of word-based violence. it was brutal. people got purple hearts coming out of those things. but i still just do not get it because it really is not that bad. it's not even the most annoyingly unique nature name out there. there are people naming sibling sets after every fucking part of a mountain, introducing their beautiful children summit, glacier, rock face, cwm, and everest-basecamp, but god forbid you even consider juniper.
overall a lot of the resistance to nature names is that many of them are newly in use and haven't become established yet, and if there's anything the (primarily white middle-class usamercian) users of naming forums hate it's innovation. well. most of the time. because the final group is...
names that are too normal.
yes. after all of that, all of the racism and appeals to the child's future struggles with a name that doesn't make it into the top 50 on the social security rankings, you can't name your kid something too normal either. little elizabeth or james will hate you for giving them a name that so many other people have. but little aurora will hate you because "the vowels sound like peanut butter in my mouth :(" and baby sebastian is "too pretentious." word on the street is that there's a secret category somewhere between these two sets of perfectly acceptable names but nobody's found it yet.
