Give me a good name, Mom!

On August 17, my wife gave birth to our first child, a gorgeous baby… girl? Yes, a girl! I told my wife. “It’s a GIRL!” The nurse asked, “What’s her name?” My wife and I gave each other simultaneous “frowny faces.” Name? We didn’t have a name yet. Now THIS was going to be the hard part.

Naming a child is an important part of parenting. Give a child a good name, someday she might be a senator. Give a child a bad name, she might end up as, say, a senator. That’s a bad example, but you get the idea.

A good name is more than just choosing a couple of words that don’t spell out something bad in initials (we considered Bethany Michelle, but decided that “BM”, short for bowel movement, was less than ideal). A name can define future greatness, respect, fame, wealth, and power, not to mention the likelihood of making a livelihood selling hubcaps.

Think about it: all the great men and women of history received names, presumably at birth, that jibed perfectly with their future accomplishments. Winston Churchill’s parents knew enough not to call him “Buddy.” Katherine Hepburn would never have been a star if her name had been “Cindi.” Richard Nixon perfectly fulfilled his nickname, “Dick.”

The weird thing about naming a child is that you’re expected to figure it out by the first day of the baby’s life. The way I figure it, you should be allowed to wait until the kid is at least three years old, so you know whether your son is a “Moses” or a “Hugh,” or whether your daughter is a “Stella” or a “Bella.”

My wife and I had started the naming process months ago. Complicating this process was our decision to wait until the baby’s birth to find out the baby’s gender. (In fact, my wife had been sure that it was a boy.) We filled up a ragged spiral notebook with various ideas, like Thurston and Maude. Well, those were my ideas. My wife’s ideas were less eccentric.

A few names were easy to rule out: Adolph, Judas, Napoleon, Benedict, Monica, and William Jefferson Clinton. Also, a friend warned that giving a boy either “Ray” or “Lee” as a middle name practically guaranteed that he would end up on death row.

Making matters worse, we had to consider the “meaning” behind each name. For instance, my first name, Matthew, means “one who humps sod.” I did not know this until I purchased a book called “Baby Names And More Baby Names,” which I found at our local supermarket for only 99 cents. It saved us from making many horrible mistakes. For example, here are some of the names we considered and the surprising meanings behind them:

Aaron: He who shoplifts enema kits
Albert: Nasal extract eater
Angela: Crazy as a vegan stranded on Pig Island
Barbara: Talks to cows
Brandt: Hummer of show tunes
Daniel: One who neuters monkeys
David: He who chugs yak urine
Erik: Collector of eight-track tapes
George: Dumb as a stump
James: Beware the engorged goiter
Kathy: Jar of gravy
Linda: The blacksmith’s whore
Lori: Non-sharer of gum
Michael: Eleven toed hillbilly
Rachel: Capable of wild sex acts in a canoe
Robyn: Smelly!
Stephanie: Lover of the hybrid yellow-meated watermelon
Suzy: Sees Elvis in her drawers
Tim: Often sweaty

Of course, we had help with this decision. For example, two girls who live across the street, Sarah and Paige, were talking with my wife one recent afternoon.

“I know what you should name the baby if it’s a girl!” said Sarah.

“Oh, me too!” said Paige.

“What’s that?” asked my wife.

“Sarah!” said Sarah.

“Or Paige!” said Paige.

So on the day of our baby’s birth, my wife and I came to a decision: we would name our baby Madeline Rosa Farr. Rosa is a family name, from my grandmother, who made legendary fruit pies, played the organ in church for more than 50 years, and called my granddad “Dumbhead” and “Deafpost” whenever he deserved it, which was often. Madeline is simply a pretty name, which means “the prettiest, smartest baby in the whole wide world who will grow up to be a multimillionaire and buy her father a vintage 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Gull Wing sports coupe.”

Now that we’ve got this name thing figured out, the next 20 years of parental duties should be a breeze.

A note to readers about the torment of humor writing
In the second paragraph, I use the term “frowny face.” But how do you spell frowny face? Similar words are no help: A wonderful treat that you buy at the church bake sale, sprinkled with powdered sugar, is a “brownie.” But a duck’s smallest, softest feathers are described as “downy.” These are the extremely difficult, sometimes dangerous, decisions that humor writers such as myself must make, simply for a laugh. And truth be told, it wasn’t even that funny.