Vivian Zachary

[psocoptera]

We knew from pretty early on the middle name would most likely be Kay. Junie is Juniper Hazel for Josh's mom's father Jack and my dad's father Howard; for the next baby we wanted to get someone from my mom's side in there, and her mom was Kay. I was also thinking about G names, for my mom's dad George, on the morbid but realistic thought that he might well not live long enough to see the end of my pregnancy, which in fact he did not, but the face my mom made over Gilbert, my favorite G name, made it clear she would not feel like her side of the family was being honored by it. And George had a couple of namesakes among his kids already, and Kay didn't, and so the last time I saw George, when I was just a few months pregnant, I went ahead and told him that we would probably honor Kay in the middle name. I'm not sure he understood - I'm not even sure he comprehended that I was pregnant - but I'm glad he maybe got to know.

(As it turned out, my mom has been way more hung up on the fact that we named our son after her mother, oh no, than that we named our son after her mother, yay, so, so much for that. I mean, it still makes *me* happy, and will hopefully seem meaningful to the son himself someday, so I have no regrets, but it would have been nice if my mom ended up happy about it too. Apparently when we ran this past her while I was pregnant she just assumed we would spell it Kaye with an e if we had a boy, which makes it a boy's name and totally different. ::rolls eyes::)

When it came to first names, things were harder. For boy names, my favorite name was still Julian, but I didn't like Juniper and Julian as sibling names - too matchy, and too likely to get the wrong one when shouted upstairs. Plus Julian is Juniper's boy name, the name she would have gotten as a boy, and it felt weird to think about giving it away, like, what if she wants a boy name at some point? So we were kind of back at square one on boy names. We'd talked about Alexander, but everyone's younger brother is named Alex. And namesake Alex is pretty well-memorialized in the greater Boston area at this point, plus, I don't know, I never met him myself, so what I know him for most primarily is having made a bunch of people really lastingly sad. I got enthused about Isidor, another family name (grandfather of George, father of Sarah Julia from which Julian), but no one else did. Josh was somewhat into Cooper, his mom's former last name, but not strongly so. At some point we came up with Zachary, which had no particular meaning or history, but we both liked it.

Quentin came about because of the tree thing. Joshua is a tree and Juniper is a tree and my middle name Laurel is a shrub or something so it seemed like it might be nice for everyone in the family to have a tree somewhere. There is a K tree, kauri, that looks like a really excellent tree and would have made a cool middle name, but I was worried that it would be cultural appropriation because unlike junipers and joshua trees I've never actually seen a kauri, they grow in places like New Zealand. Some internet search or other gave me Quennel, meaning "small oak", which sounded too French, and too much like kennel, but, hey, what about Quentin? (Or Quincy, but that's a local town, boo (although also Jason Fox's iguana, yay).) Quercus, the oak genus, would make a great Harry Potter name, but a terrible real name, but Quentin Kay could be a sort of secret code for it. (And that's what I'm telling him, if he asks where his tree is.)

Meanwhile on the girl side, there was Verity, which had been the other name we almost gave Juniper, but the more I thought about it, the more that felt wrong to me, like, it was explicitly the runner-up, the name that wasn't good enough for the first kid, so now the second kid was going to get it as the leftovers? We needed new names, or at least names that hadn't made it to the final round last time, that we could find a new appreciation for. Alexandra. Vivian. Thought about Isidora, but too close to Dora (the Explora), bleah. Iris, but Iris Smift is a mouthful. I love Nora, but somehow it never seemed like our kid.

Josh further complicated things with the idea that maybe we could ditch Kay and come up with a good K first name. He really liked Kaitlyn, but I didn't even want to consider it because of the too-many-spellings problem. So he suggested Katherine. Katherine Ivy. This was by far the strongest he'd come out in favor of *anything*, and, wah, I didn't like it - we know too many Catherines and Kathys - but he was really excited about the idea of a Katie, so I tried very hard to be excited too. We could have Junebug and Katydid! Beetle and Cricket!

So in mid-March when I was having "what the hell would we name this baby if we had it today" angst, we were pretty much down to the finalists of Quentin and Zachary, and Vivian and Katherine, or maybe Verity after all, or argh, and none of them really felt like our baby. Or a baby at all, they all seemed much older. (Zack, Zack, he's a Lego maniac, so he'd better be at least 3...) Hannah had the brilliant suggestion of writing letters to the baby to try out the names, which helped me a lot, and then, very conveniently, he turned out to not be a possible Katherine at all, so Josh didn't have to be too heartbroken about that. And now by the magic of repetition or hormones or something he seems so obviously and perfectly a Quentin. And Vivian seems like a good girl name for a Quentin if he ever wants that.

The letters, for your amusement or curiosity:

Dear Quentin,

It's hard to believe you're already ten days old. You've uncurled and are long and floppy. Josh is not thrilled that I keep calling you "quirky" but I'm not convinced it's worse than "buggins".

Dear Quentin,

I sang you happy birthday to see how it sounded. It sounded pretty good.

Dear Quentin,

Please return those dishes to the kitchen.

Dear Zachary,

Look at your little toes! I keep thinking of Kyla's baby and Zack from Saved By The Bell. Seriously I think Quentin might be you.

Dear Katherine,

Seriously, Katherine? I did this for Josh. How did I feel about it five years later?

Dear Katydid,

Today is your first day of kindergarten! I think you are going to have a great time. I'm so proud of you, cricket.

Dear Kate,

Yes, I am trying very hard to stop calling you Katydid in front of your friends. No, you can not buy those leather pants.

Dear Kathy,

Well *that's* awkward.

Dear Verity,

You seem so tiny and soft for such a serious name. And yet you are a very serious thing! A verity, in our lives.

Dear Verty,

I don't know why we never realized that Verity+Bert+Ernie was going to leave you called Verty for the next three years. Oops!

Dear Verity,

Congratulations again! I have no idea if someday you'll feel nostalgic about having cards from this sort of thing, so I thought I'd make you one.

Dear Vivian,

I just want to get this out of the way early in our relationship: I totally thought you were going to be a Quentin. (Er, which is not to say you still can't, if at some future point that seems right.) But when we actually met you and saw who you were, there you were Vivian, all right.

Dear Vivie,

Please just stop. For a minute. Can we please just be quiet for a minute.

Dear Vivian,

Thank you for your proposal regarding your allowance. We have read it and it is very nicely put together. We have a couple of questions regarding some of your figures, would you rather discuss by email or in a meeting?

Dear Vivian,

Hi.

Comments

[ursula]

Random onomastics-geek fact: Julian was sometimes a girl's name in the Middle Ages! (It's the same name as Gillian secretly.)

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

yes, as in "Julian of Norwich," she of the awesomely psychedelic visions. Jesus-our-mother is the one that blows undergraduate minds, but I've always been fond of her vision of the world:

"And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has been through the love of God."

[irilyth]

Do Julia and Julie come from the same root, or are they totally separate? (I'd assumed that Julian/Julia were related, but don't actually know.)

[ursula]

Yes, they're the same root (one Latinate ending, one French ending).

The Julian/Julia connection is a little bit subtler: you have to go back to ancient Rome. In Latin, Julius was a nomen gentilicium (family name), and Julia was the feminine form of that family name. It's a little glib to say just "family name", though: your gentilicium identifies your gens, which was a big socio-political unit. Julianus was a cognomen; that's usually translated "byname". Somebody whose original family name was Julius, but who was adopted into a different gens (usually for political/economic reasons), would have kept Julianus as a cognomen, and taken a new nomen gentilicium. The famous example of this sort of thing is Octavian, whose original family name was Octavius, but who went by Julius Octavianus after Julius Caesar formally adopted him.

You get Julian from Julianus or Juliana by dropping the Latin ending, but Julia just comes from Latin Julia.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

V. interesting! Please contribute random onomastics-geekery whenever applicable. Also, "onomastics", I just learned a new word, thanks!

[cereph.livejournal.com]

It is neat to see the thought process of how you arrived at the names, and thank you for sharing the letters. I think my favorite is:

Dear Kate,

Yes, I am trying very hard to stop calling you Katydid in front of your friends. No, you can not buy those leather pants.

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

I think of Kay as a totally unisex name, fwiw -- undoubtedly as a result of all the King Arthur I read as a child.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly what I was going to say. Plus I have a male friend who goes by "K" but sometimes spells it "Kay".

[gannet.livejournal.com]

Yes, and there's a boy named Kay in the Snow Queen.

[asmanyaswill.livejournal.com]

And there's always K in Men in Black... What, not helpful? ;->

[aryky.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. It really confuses me to hear that someone thinks of it as not a boy's name with that spelling.

[irilyth]

> He really liked Kaitlyn, but I didn't even want to consider it because of the too-many-spellings problem.

...which is obviously a fairly serious problem, because I would've spelled it Katelyn. :^)

[sheepboyofchaos.livejournal.com]

Ahhh... you would not have included the silent 'x'?

[ursula]

I'd expect an initial X: Xaytylyn!

[irilyth]

Also, I was thinking that I could always call Quentin "cricket", but I've since sort of settled into the idea that bug nicknames are Juniper's, and bird nicknames are for him. She still has more nicknames than he does, but that might change eventually.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

That's my experience - nicknames accrete.

And how is Beetle such a common one? That's what we called T (and still do some). Also Joyful Boyful. Which looks much worse written than it sounds.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

Also, I just have to mention we joked about naming T "Dougal Fergus", because S has a Scottish last name.

[asmanyaswill.livejournal.com]

Ah, you've made it safe for him to take up Scottish Country Dancing and discover Fugal Fergus.

[gannet.livejournal.com]

Hee!

[sofer.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing this. I like to hear the thought process of choosing names. It's always a little sad not to get to use all of them, but I like Quentin a lot. I'd never heard of Kaye (with an e) as specifically a boy's name. I like Vivian a lot too, although it does make me think of the character from "The Linguini Incident."

[sheepboyofchaos.livejournal.com]

You can use them all if you have enough kids! ;)

[belecrivain.livejournal.com]

Can't Vivian also be a boy's name? Or is that just in 1920s England?

Julian is also a female character in The Black Prince, an Iris Murdoch novel that I have only read part of. She dresses up as Hamlet and the male protagonist, who is twenty years her senior, jumps her. It's a bit disturbing.

I like the idea of writing letters to the baby. If we have a third and need a bunch of different candidates I might use it. (We are probably not having a third.)