Hitler, Jezebel, & Fidel

Some couples have fun naming their babies. These are the same people who have a boy's & girl's name picked out by the 3rd month of pregnancy and later enter their babies' pictures in all of those cutest-baby-of-the-week magazine contests.

The problem with the rest of us, besides a tendency towards perfectionism, is that we crave for meaning, originality, and above all, names without bad karma.

You know what I'm talking about: names that make you sneer because the last person you knew who bore them were total heathens.

EXAMPLES
1. Melissa & Emily = Heartless girls from school who will only show up at the reunion to relive their heydays
2. Candy & Mercedes = Don't care how you cut it, these names are destined for strippers
3. Michael & Joseph = Biblical names, when shortened, are generally owned by the godless
4. Yuna, Mace, Xzavier, etc. = Might as well name my kid 'Gandalf' if we're going this route
5. Chase & Brice = These names belong on the set of Passions or Days of Our Lives, not on future job applications.
6. Herbert & Elmer = Middle name: Wuss

My brother told me not to over-think the name thing. I'm having trouble doing that. Some names have been stricken from the list just because they are too easy to turn into taunts (Fatty Patty). To add to the dilemma, my husband and I don't have the same standard for what a 'good' name is. I like names that are heroic in literature (Phineas, Bastion, Liam, Basil, Tristan), but since most of those names came from historical or fantasy novels I read years ago, now they all sound a bit, well, prissy. Piper, Madison, Maya--these work for me, too.

Tim, however, has mentioned names like Cathryn, which as we learned today, was the second most popular name back in '98 ... 1898.

Sigh.