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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]alistor[/quote]

Heh...well, the most common spelling I've ever seen is Alistair and I actually really like the name (I also like Alyouisius and Franciose), but yeah, unless you've got family/heritage, they're pretty esoteric names and I think esoteric~=pretension.  A good friend of mine did name his son this, but then his family has a much more recent and direct connection to minor European nobility (cadet branch) and can pull it off...plus, they live overseas now in a locale where this won't stick out so much.

[quote=Anonymous]A friend of mine who married into an old money country club family in another part of va did the normal first+pretentious middle ---> call kid pretentious middle name route. All her friends there have horribly pretentious names and nicknames. It probably goes along with the prentioud southern naming pattern, but really...barf.[/quote]

Double Ha!  I am the old money, blue-blood in our marriage and this is the exact route I'm going with the naming thing. I was the guy asking about Atticus.  I am not using any of my family names because they are just too...not ready to be recycled.  I have this kind of name myself, and I agree, it is both a blue-blood and "southern" thing (though more the former than the latter) - the object is to have a marker indicating what tribe you are a part of, and I'm not slightly ashamed of my tribe. But the real marker of old money is not flashing your money - the pretentious stuff is typically nouveau-riche people trying to establish themselves.

I do find the insistence on using the more...unusual...name to be a kind of pretension - but then I kind of frown on any kind of "look at me" attention whore behavior - and this applies equally to hippy-dippy earth mother names, faux African, deliberate "alternate" spellings of names, goth attire, BME, tatts and purple hair.  My first name is a perennial/eternal super-common name, and I grew up using (and still use) a really plain nick-name extracted from my snooty middle name.  I have two siblings were not so lucky: although they got more "common" everyday names as middle names, my parents insisted on calling them by the very highly unusual (think Roman) first names they were given.  This was cruel, IMHO.  The one who was most tormented actually turned into one of those drama club "look at me" artsy-fartsy attention whores (yes, not my favorite sibling) later in life and would have been blessed by "discovering" that unusual name as a middle name.  I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who grew up with names they didn't like and as part of the leaving-home-and-reinventing themselves routine changed names - typically heading off to college.

I'm inclined to go with Atticus as a middle name - using the first name which is much more nondescript and also not a family name - so that it's there in case the kid ever wants to go with something more unique and unusual.  I am still ambivalent, because of my bad experience with Roman names (which is the etymology of Atticus).  [/quote]

:shock: [/quote]

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