Creating a Custom Name List

[Ness]

There's a politician in Australia called Richard Face. 

[flowerchile]

On the subject of teachers, for woodwork I had Mr. Carpenter and my brother had Mr. Pine. The school only had two woodworks teachers.


However, earlier, I'd gone to school with a guy whose surname was Kerr. Not a bad name by itself, there are Kerrs in my family tree.

But his first name was Wayne.

Freaky..  we had a guy at school named Wayne Kerr as well.   I also had heard that many years before I went there, there was a guy called Dwayne Pipe 

[ingeli]

Astrid Lindgren, the well-known Swedish writer of children's books (Pippi Longstocking! Swedish: Pippi Långstrump), created in one of her later works, a very nice young pre-teen love couple, Ronja and Birk. Both names were "new" to Swedish naming, but the book and the film made them extremely popular and there are quiet a few Birks and Ronjas around now, in the younger generations. Ronja and Birk in the book were kind of a Romeo and Juliet couple, children of 2 competing forest robber chiefs.
In Sweden the naming habits show that ppl tend to name their kids after the grandmother/father generation, so names become popular in cycles of 75 years or so. In the 40-s and 50-s we hade wave of double first names (like Sue Ellen, Jim Bob) in Swedish: Gun-Britt, Britt-Inger, Kent-Jörgen, Sven-Bertil, ect. Those havent regained popularity YET, lol. I also love Swedish versions of Very American names, obviously from movies, sometimes spelled in a Swedish way: Violet = Vailet. My cousin, born 1951 had a classmate with that name, she was super cool and had purple colored nails.. I worshipped her at age 7, lol.

Sometimes the Hollywood inspired names were spelled right, but pronounced in Swedish, even more funny and almost impossible to explain for non-Swedes, hehe.

The Russian first names are very conservative, traditionally names of saints. My favorites in Russian is Vera (Faith) Nadezhda (Hope) and Lyubov (Love). To make things a bit more confusing Russians ALWAYS have nicknames: Nadezhda = Nadia, Tatiana = Tania, Alexander = Sasha, and patronymes as middle names: Alexander Ivanovich Petrov (Ivan's son) and you need to keep track of all of them as you noticed when reading Russian classic novels, hehe.

Soviet era brought a new kind of Russian names, popular in Russia in the 20-s and the 30-s: Traktor (tractor) Elektron or Ninel (girls name, made of Lenin backwards), and such.

Here are some classic Swedish family names: Björk, Lind, Gran, Ek, Asp, Ask, Poppel (all tree names)
Swedish soldiers in the old days were named when recruited, often with names describing them: Rolig (=Funny) Djärv (=Bold) Stark (= Strong) or animals/birds like: Duva (Pidgeon) Falk (Falcon) Örn (Eagle)
The reason for this was to get rid of all the Anderssons and Svenssons (ppl earlier mostly had had patronym last name always, and the women were Andersdotter, Jonsdotter ect.)
Most common first names in Sweden today are Erik and Maria.

And as Midsummer now starts over here, Happy Midsummer from Stockholm from
Ingeli
(Do not forget to run naked 7 times around your house tomorrow night, or you wont see your groom/bride to be )
(OR pick 7 kinds of flowers to put under your pillow to dream of the same groom/bride)

[Lorelei]

Naming Tools and Guides

http://inch.stormpages.com/index.html -- What Not To Name The Baby

http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/index.html -- True Tales Of Bad, Bad Baby Names

http://nine.frenchboys.net/index.php -- A whole slew of name generators

[Sagana]

Some of these 'don't name your baby this' people need to get a life.

[Hook]

Some of these 'don't name your baby this' people need to get a life.

Certainly the people who run the sites at the first two links do. The only thing I can think of is that it's supposed to be humor, and I don't get it.

For example, I worked with a black lady who was pregnant, and when her daughter was born she named her Kiesha.  I was curious, and asked her where the name came from.  It turns out that the name wasn't made up, but had African roots.  This is exactly the opposite of what the first site suggests in their first link.

We've got a lot better examples here of "don't name your baby this" than anything I saw on those sites.

Hook

[Gwill]

The only naming no-no I believe in is "don't give a child a first name that ends in the same letter as the last name begins with", just because it makes the name hard to pronounce without having to take an unnatural pause.

[notveryawesome]

Rhyming names are bad too. I once worked with somebody named Delores Flores.

[angelyne]

Necromancy blah blah ...

Jumping here kinda late with a pretty funny name.  Totally real.  His last name was Vanderputte. What makes it funny is that pute (spelled differently) meant bitch or ho, in French slang.  He did pronounce it Vanderpoot.  I can imagine the teasing at school....oye vey.

On a different note, I tried to download that program that lets you use a word processing to import names and the link was dead.  Does anyone have it?