A Rhose by any other name...

Until you’ve tried to identify kids for a picture that will run in a newspaper, it’s hard to understand just how many ways there are to spell what otherwise seems like a straightforward name. For every Erin, it seems, there’s an Aerin or an Aryn. For every Justin there’s a Juston or a Justyn.
Things seem to get more difficult the younger the children are. I can imagine a day in the near future when I will take a picture of a group of smiling fourth grade students and not know how to spell a single child’s name.
“What’s your name?” I will ask the first girl.
“Taylor,” she’ll say.
“OK. Taylor,” I’ll say, writing in my notebook.
“That’s T-A-E-Y-L-O-R-R.”
“Um, OK. And you?”
“I’m Zachary.”
“Zachary?”
“Z-A-K-K-E-R-Y.”
“Really? And you?”
“Matthew.”
“Well, that one’s easy.”
“M-A-T-T-H-U-E.”
“No.”
“Yep.”
“I’m Ashley.”
“And how do you …?”
“A-S-H-S-L-E-I-G-H.”
“Ash-slay?”
“The S is silent.”
“Of course it is.”
There is some fundamental aspect of baby naming I just don’t understand. I realize parents want their child to have unique names, but things seem to be getting out of control. We live in a world with Madelines, Madelyns, Madelinns and, for all I know, Maddelyinns.
The unique spelling trend seems to be most common among girls, but there is enough of it on both sides of the gender gap that that on the Social Security Administration’s recently released list of Minnesota’s most popular boys’ names for 2005 there were entries for both Aidan (No. 38) and Aiden (49), Caden (69) and Kaden (79).
Maybe it’s because I work with words, but I’m all for predictable spellings. Someone I know recently named his baby girl Maya. It’s a unique name. Before she was born the only other Maya I’d heard of was a character on the mediocre sitcom “Just Shoot Me,” although I’m not sure that’s a ringing endorsement. But the name was spelled exactly how I would expect it to be spelled — like the people who built all those pyramids in Mexico — not with vowels and consonants placed willy-nilly to serve as linguistic landmines to otherwise well-meaning journalists just trying to do a job.
I don’t understand how certain names become popular, either. Some parents name their children after relatives, but I can’t imagine there are enough young girls being named after Grandma Destiny to account for that name’s popularity (No. 90 on the list, apparently setting the stage for a large influx of exotic dancers in Minnesota sometime around 2023). There are hardly any baby Margarets these days, a fact I blame mostly on the negative portrayal of Margarets in the Dennis the Menace comic strip. The first Kayla I ever knew was a Farmington High School student who mentored with me a couple of years ago. Now every third elementary school girl in the United States is a Kayla. How does that happen?
According to a story in Tuesday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, the hottest name for girls these days is Nevaeh, at No. 55 last year on Minnesota’s baby names list and apparently climbing like a monkey on amphetamines. The name is “Heaven” spelled backward and is pronounced nuh-VAY-uh, which mostly makes me think of lotion.
What might be most frightening, though, is the story gave at least part of the credit for the name’s popularity to the fact a member of the Christian rock band P.O.D. named his own daughter Nevaeh, a fact he apparently revealed on the MTV show “Cribs.” In other words, America is taking it’s baby-naming tips from a show where mid-level celebrities show off their cars and swimming pools. And, apparently, their newborns.
When I mentioned the growing popularity of Nevaeh to someone in my office he threatened to name his firstborn son Lleh. I would never go that far, although might name one of my children Yrotagrup, which I would of course pronounce “Frank.”