Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:If you've been following this thread, pretty much any Southern naming traditions are viewed as pretentious or trashy on DCUM. Ignore it. Don't take advice from Jersey Shore wannabes.
But you have no stereotyping or class issues, PP. None. (And you weirdly assume that everyone here is a "Jersey Shore wannabe"? Whoosh to your reading skills, lady.)
I like Hutchings, although I think it would be misheard as Hutchens or Hitchens a lot.
Just so you know, although I've been accused of being hilariously pretentious on this thread, I am the person who mentioned "Hutchings" and I am not the person who called anyone a "Jersey Shore Wannabe", because that would be rude, I am a southerner with good breeding and I do not say "bless your heart".
As a many generation southerner from a very long line of people with recycled given and sur- names, I disagree that this practice, in and of itself, is pretentious - it's not an affectation I adopted in order to have some pretense to a background I don't have - I literally didn't ask for it and it is my actual background. That doesn't make me a better or more worthy person than anyone else from any other background. It does mean that I'm not being "pretentious" when I (re)use what are really my family names.
Pretension is putting on airs - adopting superficial totems of another in order to try to claim "belonging". It is pretentious when white boys from Chevy Chase adopt hip-hop names and talk like they are from east of the park (or east of the Anacostia). It's pretentious when manassaholes put brick gateposts up out in front of their modular unit and name their kids Carrington.
I mentioned a few names I really like, but would never give my child, because they would be a pretension - for example, suggesting French heritage. I'm a francophile and I think they're great names, but I'm not of French descent.