Somebody just now posted that one about "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" again

[conuly]

(Link)

and it reminded me of something that happened when I was a kid, just a strange anecdote.

We had an upstairs neighbor with two kids, one six or seven years old and the other a toddler.

For a year or so, they called that younger child Aida. I remember this very clearly because we had the sheet music for excerpts from the opera Aida. And then when the kid was about two or so they suddenly switched to calling her a completely different name.

I was never able to get her sister to admit they'd changed the baby's name. I don't think I ever asked her mother about it either. Even now, years later, I think about it and wonder what the heck that was about and if maaaaaaybe I completely made this up and it didn't happen. Either possibility is weird as hell, you have to admit.

Comments

[purplecat]

When I was young the family opposite believed a child should be allowed to grow a bit before being definitively named. Their youngest son was, IIRC, Sam for about a fortnight and then Toby for the next couple of years before rather dramatically, I thought, becoming Orlando. I've no idea how this worked with the birth registration and official name bureaucracy but he remains officially Orlando to this day though his wikipedia page says he prefers to be known as Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs these days which may also say something about his family's attitude to names though quite what I'm not sure.

[hudebnik]

When I was just out of grad school, I had a professional colleague (not close, just somebody I ran into occasionally at academic conferences) who had named his new baby Arju, a name chosen to not suggest any particular gender, and he and he wife were scrupulously not telling anyone the child's physical sex, nor using gendered pronouns in referring to Arju.

Which sounds sorta ho-hum today, but it was radical 25 years ago.

[conuly]

It only sounds ho-hum today if you move in fairly radical circles. I don't think I personally know anybody who's tried it.

[redbird]

In some ways I do move in radical circles. The people I know who referred to their child as "they" until he was old enough to say that he was a boy are trans, polyamorous, and live in Somerville.

[redbird]

My guess would be that the child was named "Aida $middlename $lastname" and they started calling her by her middle name because "Aida" was the name of a relative and they had a major fight with, or because they'd given up on trying to please the person they'd named her after.

I am reminded of a maybe-true story from back in the 1980s, of a friend-of-a-friend who was a huge Star Wars fan. My friend suggested she name her baby "George Lucas Family-name" instead of "Luke Skywalker Family-name" because someone offered a fair-sized monetary gift if she named the baby after her uncle George. I suspect that kid's everyday name was "Luke," especially if older relatives started referring to "little George."

Several of my friends and acquaintances are going by middle names, or variations thereon, though as far as I know all of changes were the person's own idea, not something their parents did when they were small.

[conuly]

Actually, dredging my memory, I think it is the case that one of the two names was the middle name. I still was never able to get my friend to admit they'd changed what they called her. Well, maybe it was all as strange to her as it was to me!

[cactuswatcher]

I knew a boy in grade school called Ovid like the Roman poet. He was a friend and as long as I was in grade school and in the same class, that's what he was called. Because of increasing enrollment I was moved to a different grade school for a couple years. We were back in the same school again in junior high through high school. We were never in the same classes again, and I had very little reason or opportunity to talk with him again. But I learned right away in junior high no one was calling him Ovid any more. He was being called by his very common first name exclusively. Ovid turned out to be his middle name. I always wondered if he started getting picked on or he just didn't like Ovid any more.

[conuly]

There was a kid in our elementary school called Eros. Nobody, I think, knows what the parents were thinking.

[brokenallbroken]

In my temp days, one of the ladies in an office I worked in had the middle name Elegius, because her family let the kids choose their own middle names at 10 or 13 or something as part of a coming of age, and at that age she thought she wanted to be a doctor.


ETA: And of course as soon as I hit Post, I am reminded of the bit in Babylon 5 about Narn having a pouchling name and choosing their own adult name. I forget which IRL culture that was borrowed from. I also just remembered in my History of Japan class (lo these many years ago, so grain of salt) learning the Ainu call(ed) their children "piece of shit" for the first year, until their survival is more certain, to convince evil spirits there's nothing worth taking there.

[conuly]

It's common enough worldwide to have one name for infancy and another at a certain point, or even several in succession until adulthood, or to change them for any old reason.

[greghousesgf]

I know in some cultures people have one name as a little kid and a different name as they get older, maybe that has something to do with it.

[archersangel]

the comments remind me of this girl in high school.
i didn't really know her, we just had a couple of classes together. i heard her talking to a teacher one time that she was named for her grandfather and hated the name, it was some old-fashion thing that i've only heard once before, & as soon as she turned 18 (& saved the $300 to get it done) she was getting it changed to the name she was going by in school.

[conuly]

Good plan.