A propos of nothing

Will someone please tell Hillary Clinton to stop wearing tapered pants? Thanks, appreciate it much.

Would a Rose by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?

So, Janet posted a meme, in which you're supposed to grab the nearest book, turn to page 123, find the fifth sentence, and post the next four sentences. So, the nearest book (sitting right here on the desk in front of my monitor) is A Dictionary of First Names (Oxford), and the four sentences on page 123 starting at about the fifth sentences are:

Francesco (m.) Italian: originally a vocabulary word meaning 'French' or 'Frenchman' (Late Latin Franciscus; cf. Frank). This was a nickname given to St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) because of his wealthy father's business connections in France. His baptismal name was Giovanni. He had a pleasant, ordinary life as a child and young man, but after two serious illnesses, a period of military service, and a year as a prisoner of war in Perugia, he turned from the world and devoted himself to caring for the poor and the sick. He was joined by groups of disciples, calling themselves 'minor friars' (friari minores). The main features of the Franciscan rule are humility, poverty, and love for all living creatures.

Okay, that's a little more than five sentences. Forgive me. The fact that this book was the handiest shows what I've been thinking about lately. Lately meaning the last five months or so: names. In that time, I've been thinking lots about the name we'll give to our third child and first daughter, but also about names for family and friends who have had or will have babies. Not surprisingly, probably, I have very firm ideas about what makes a good name:

1. It should be recognizable as a name. There are so many wonderful names out there, I fail to see the point in making up something new.

2. It should use a standard spelling. Some names have multiple variants already; don't make up something just to be different. Tayler with an e "because she's a girl" doesn't work for me.

3. The child's gender should be at least surmisable. No, I'm not a big fan of the genderless names, from old ones like Terry and Lynn through Shannon and Kelly up to Taylor and Ryan.

4. It should "go" with the last name, at least aurally if not ethnically.

5. It should not be popular or trendy. If people ask me for advice, I strongly urge them not to pick a name in the SSA top 100. I personally would avoid anything in the top 1000. This is not as hard as it sounds. I also try to avoid names already used by family and friends or other kids in the neighborhood. Not that I'm always successful--Number One was not the only kid with his name (which entered the top 1000 for the first time in 125 years last year; the wee feller's name hasn't been in the top 1000 for 20 years, and never ranked higher than the mid-600s) on his baseball team this spring (though the other kid's was pronounced with a short initial vowel).

6. For girls, names should not be overly cutesy, and feminized male names should generally be avoided (Paula, Roberta, Thomasina, etc.).

So with all these rules, I've dabbled some in name consulting, providing lists of names for friends and family who are interested. I've never yet charged, though after reading an article about name consultants in the WSJ a few weeks ago I'm sorely tempted. Not because they're making so much money, just because they're doing such a crappy job! Giving a couple a list of names that runs to over 1000 names or 15 pages isn't doing much to help narrow the field. And who are the people who hire name consultants? Okay, mostly they sound pretty pathetic. It's kind of sad when you pay a name consultant to come up with something "original" and then you end up with a name (from the consultant's list) that's been in the top 50 for the last three years. Yeah, really original.*

So, if you're interested in what names I'd recommend for you, drop me a line. I won't even charge you, and I promise the list will all fit easily on one page. The last two lists I made had 14 names (for a girl, a fairly winnowed-down list) and 33 names (for a boy, a very rough first-draft list). And hey--if you've got serious suggestions for Ingeborg's real name (that meet all my rules above), by all means pass them along!

*The names picked by the name-consultant clients in the article: Leah Marie, Anna Irene, Ava, Nicole Josephine, Max Phillip, Ross, Natalie, Evander Jet, Sheridan, Beckett, Gabriel Rush (these last three were chosen by name consultants for their own children), Jackson Dean, and Jackson Thomas. Of these, all the girl names but Sheridan, which is not in the top 1000, were in the top 100 last year. Gabriel and Jackson are both top 50, Max 160, Ross and Beckett in the mid-700s, and Evander not in the top 1000.

All Substitutions Are Not Created Equal

So I read an article recently (I think in the Oregonian FOODday, but I can't find it online--maybe they don't post all the syndicated articles they reprint) about the popularity of sites like allrecipes.com and epicurious.com, and specifically about how people write comments on the recipes saying how they tried it, and then describe all the substitutions they've made to the recipe, many of which change the basic character of the dish. I very rarely check any of these sites (my four-foot shelf of cookbooks usually turns up something appropriate), but this drives me batty! One time on an (non-food-related) e-mail list I shared a recipe for sourdough waffles, and a woman wrote back the next day saying she'd tried the recipe and how much she liked the result. Then she said how she hadn't wanted to wait the three days for the sourdough cultures to develop, so she'd added some yeast. Okay, you didn't make sourdough waffles. You made yeasted waffles, a totally different animal! You can't say that you made my recipe. I know that almost all the recipes I post here I changed in at least some small way when I made them, but I try to be clear about where I've deviated, and I like to think that the changes I make are small and subtle, and that my execution remains true to the spirit of the original.

Guess this is just one more of the many things about which I care more than the average American. Sigh.