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Comment by phdelightful | Hacker News Reader

I’m a new parent, so I just got to (had to?) name someone for the first time. In my jurisdiction you actually have quite a while before you have to make that choice, but you do eventually need to make it. It speaks to lots of point in this essay:

My son certainly doesn’t know his name yet, but it’s how everyone addresses him. So it is definitely not an integral part of his identity, at least as he experiences it.

The name doesn’t have any meaning for me nor my wife. It is normal enough to be familiar, stands out enough to not disappear, is nice to abbreviate, sounds pleasing to our ears. But it also has nothing to do with him or his ancestry at all, except it’s ethnically congruous I guess.

So my son is not at all his name, probably for the only time in his life. It is a bit odd.

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I wanted to ensure I had a good relationship with my son with no poor preconceived mental notions. So any name corresponding with a dickhead I knew was immediately thrown out.

The name is not unheard of, so no doubt there will be dickheads out there with this name. But not that I personally know of, so in my mind the name/identity is his to shape.

So many people avoid the names of people they've disliked or hated. They advise their siblings, children, or friends, "Don't name your child that. I knew someone with that name and I didn't like them."

And yet it seems that so few realize what a poor reason that is to avoid a name. Your perception of a name is not permanent. In fact, your perception of a name is quickly overwritten when you are closely associated with someone of that name.

You'll forget all about that person you don't like if someone close to you shares their name. The person close to you owns it now, at least in your mind.

This is not a judgment of the parent commenter. Everyone has a right to name their children as they choose. I just wish more people noticed how fluid their perception of a name is.

I agree with you however there is the point of the person in question having already established themselves.

The new friend with the once-tainted name already has a personality/life-experience they can use to enforce your new view of that name.

A new baby has no self identity as yet and will be largely shaped by the parental interactions. As a parent, I didn't want my poor perception of a name to negatively affect in any minute conscious or unconscious way how I interact with my newborn child.

Extreme? Yeah. But parents tend to get a bit extreme on some aspect or other when it comes to their kids and I figured that - as you say - it's just a name. If my extreme is to simply rule out names I don't like, then that's not so bad.

I went through this as well and kept throwing out "Sharper Image" as a name, one for the homage to the Simpsons' "Max Power", and two because it'd be hard not to confront that name as "not my identity". It's hardly even the identity of the products distributed by the now defunct company.

Thankfully I would never get my way on this. My first born's name fits the criteria you listed almost exactly. The idea of naming them after an older family member is growing on me for similar reasons - it's fun to say "oh you're just like Grandpa <name> in this way, but not in this other way" I guess.

"Max Power" is an interesting one to me because it mostly-plausibly feels like a real name. After all, there are plenty of people with the given name Max, and plenty of people with the family name Power.

Friends have the surname Pan. They were threatening Fry and Marsi for a while...

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