Legal Research

The Friday Fillip

By Simon Fodden

What shall we name the baby?

Put aside the fact that relatively few names work for boys but anything at all seems to go for girls nowadays, there are the matters of nicknames, faux pas with initials, unfortunate translations . . . and then rhyming.

Laura Wattenberg does a riff on rhyming on the Baby Name Wizard site, starting with the fuss that gets made of the fact that nothing rhymes with “orange.” What, she asks sensibly, rhymes with “purple”?

What’s it got to do with names? Well, she asks us to compare two names, Kayden and Faith. Although Faith is far more common,

Kayden is one of 40 names rhyming with Aidan that make the boys’ top-1000 list. Even a rare name like Grayden hardly sounds distinctive in a Jayden-meet-Brayden world. Faith is a top-100 name, but its stand-alone sound helps keep it from sounding overused.

(“Jayden,” I ask myself. “Man, are you ‘old skool’,” I answer.)

She then gives us a list of names from the top 200 in the U.S. that don’t lend themselves to rhyme:

BOYS, Adam, Cesar, Cooper, Diego, Ezekiel, Grant, Hunter, Isaac, Jesus, Levi, Malachi, Noah, Omar, Oscar, Seth, Spencer, Timothy, Travis, Vincent, Wyatt
GIRLS, Amber, Autumn, Avery, Daisy, Faith, Giselle, Kennedy, Lydia, Naomi, Piper, Rebecca, Reese, Ruby, Shelby, Summer, Violet

Now, I happen to know that Simon rhymes with pie-man — it’s not in the top 200 boys’ names (though curiously it has climbed up to 240th from near obscurity in North America) — but when it comes to names, it might rhyme with Lyman. But that’s it, I think. So I’m happy to recommend it as a stand-out name.

So the question for the day is: who do you rhyme with?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on February 12, 2010 (boomark / email).