Rachel Halliwell: Why parents pick weird names

Calling your daughter Nutella? I’ll merrily agree to that, says Rachel Halliwell. Photo / Thinkstock

Opinion

Calling your daughter Nutella? I’ll merrily agree to that, says Rachel Halliwell.

What's in a name? Rather a lot, according to a French judge, who ruled an emphatic "non" this week in the case of two couples who had tried to register the name Nutella for their babies.

The parents said they were extremely fond of the chocolate spread and hoped that by naming their girls after it, they too would turn out to be sweet and popular. The judge objected, quite reasonably you might think, on the grounds that the children could be teased as a result. So the parents agreed to compromise and have named the girl Ella instead.

I can relate to parents who, having fixed on an unusual name, can't understand what the problem with it. When we named our middle daughter Merrily, my husband and I knew we had hit upon a moniker that would set her apart from the crowd; it would help her stand out as the unique and sunny girl we were certain she would turn out to be.

Not for this child the anonymity of a name like Sophie or Jane. We wanted our baby to be called something that would roll mellifluously off the tongue, while conjuring up the absolute joy that her birth had brought us.

"So you named me after an adverb," is how Merrily, now 16, dolefully sums it up. "You signed me up for a life of having to spell out my name because it's either constantly mispronounced or nobody can quite believe anyone would actually call their child after a grammatical term."

In fact Merrily was the name of one of my husband's former colleagues: a gregarious, attractive woman, who was funny and edgy. The minute you heard her name, you couldn't imagine her being called anything else. I wanted something equally arresting for my daughter.

But research suggests it was our egos that were responsible. A study by the University of Amsterdam claims that it is parents with a sense of superiority - people who overvalue their children's place in society, and therefore their own - who land their children with whacky names.

This may be true. We gave all three of our daughters unusual names: Bronte for our eldest and Bridie for our youngest. And I've yet to meet anyone who can persuade me that my children are not the most remarkable human beings to walk the earth.

The original Merrily did say it took her until her mid-teens to really embrace her name; she had found it somehow too chirpy, with its connotations of laughter and music. And as she grew older, she realised that having a name so unusual brought with it responsibility.

I never really understood what she meant by that, until our own Merrily explained.

"There's no hiding place when you're called Merrily," she has complained time and again.

"You can't fade into the background, and at school you're always the first face to be attached to a name, so you get blamed for everything."

She has cleverly used this argument to give us responsibility for being handed detentions for crimes she might otherwise have got away with. Unsurprisingly, I don't feel too bad about that.

But I have felt some pangs of guilt over the years, dating back to when she started primary school and soon after refused to answer to her name. Her teacher pulled me aside and said she thought that being surrounded by children with names like Charlotte and Lucy left Merrily feeling "different", before adding, pointedly: "At this age, children really don't like to feel they stand out."

I suspect Merrily sensed a hint of remorse on my part, because from then on she seemed hell-bent on helping that nagging seed of self-doubt to grow. Trips to the zoo would end with fury in the gift shop because her name wasn't on any of the mugs or pencil cases she might have bought with her pocket money.

So why did we inflict such names on our children? Until our eldest girl was born, she was going to be Rebecca. "But she doesn't look like a Rebecca," I said to my husband Carl in the moments after her birth.

Carl agreed and, inspired by a character in a film we'd watched just before I went into labour, quickly came up with Bronte. She is now 19 and has always liked her name. So has Bridie, who is eight.

Meanwhile, Merrily will now grudgingly admit she can't imagine being called anything else, even though people sometimes accuse her of pretending to be called Merrily.

"Why would anyone pretend to be called Merrily?" she asked me, aghast. But she said it in good spirits, so perhaps she just needed to be older for the burden of having such a memorable name to feel lighter.

Either way, I have no regrets. My Merrily has grown up to be a funny, sunny, extrovert. If anyone could carry that name off, it was always going to be her.

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