Baby Gifts Blog

Posts Tagged ‘baby names’

Here we are in the UK for two  gift tradeshows over the next two weeks, and the first pictures of the UK Prime Minister with his week-old baby Florence have been realeased. This morning I read with interest that David and Samantha Cameron are following a UK trend in naming their child after a holiday destination.

Visits abroad by UK residents may have fallen at the fastest rate on record since the 1970s but according to baby name researcher Bounty.com, it seems parents are increasingly influenced by holiday destinations when naming their children – with over 18,000 parents choosing to call their babies after places such as Bali, Capri and Cuba over the past 10 years.

 Florence, Rio and Paris are the most favoured holiday themed names chosen by parents, closely followed by India, Sydney and Lucia. The New York Borough of Brooklyn, not the most exotic location for a trip away, also makes the top ten with over a thousand parents taking the lead of the Beckhams when naming their children.

And it’s not just holidays abroad that are inspiring parents with a total of 1,255 Devons born over the past 10 years – not to mention 6 Brightons and 4 Dublins!

My mind works in weird and wonderful ways… Do you ever get to a thought, kind of bizarre, and then retrace your steps trying desperately to work out how you got there?

Yesterday I was photographing our new dinosaur toys (baby gift addons) and I started thinking about the names manufacturers call their plush toys (Steggie, Trevor and Tristen). My mind then leapt to Toy Story 3, and the name of that dinosaur - Rex. Then I thought about the clever names they had come up with at Pixar. Which lead me to my final snippit of infrmation. Did you know that at Pixar in the credits of the movies, they list “production babies” - babies that were born to all of the Pixar staff during the making of the movie. There were 67 Toy Story 3 production babies. Their names are released when the dvd is.

Will keep you posted.

Turns out Micheal Jackson was not the only one in his family who had a penchant for strange baby names. Blanket’s Uncle, Jermaine Jackson has a “j” thing happening. (yes, eight scrabble points)

Jermaine has a Jermaine Jr., a Jaimy, a Jermajesty, and a bunch of other J-name kids: Jeremy, Jourdynn, and Jafaar. I feel for the 2 “no j” left-out children Autumn and Dawn (he seemed to have switched to a more nature/seasonal theme with his second wife) 

Jermaine’s third wife is currently pregnant with twins girls to be named Mecca and Medina. 

As a result, the j ratio will become 3:2.

Scrabble as been in the news lately. This years re-release of the 1940’s game saw an alleged change to the rules, and scrabble-die-hards (me included) are up in arms. You are now purportedly allowed proper nouns, places and foreign words. Not at my board you’re not!

So I started thinking about baby names and scrabble. And I googled the subject. I found an interesting article about that very subject. http://www.babynamewizard.com/node/206

As colors are to fashion, letters are to baby names. They sweep in and out of fashion, alone and in combinations. The hot letters today sound quirky and exotic, the kind of letters that beg for individual attention.

But how do parents know which letters are most exotic? No problem. That question was answered generations ago by an unemployed architect named Alfred Butts, who invented the game of Scrabble. Butts chose point values for letters based on popular usage of the time, with the workhorse letters (vowels, l, n, r, s, t) worth one point, and the rare birds far more.

Those depression-era value assignments remain an intuitively accurate portrait of letter “exoticness.” The letters that jump out from a rack of Scrabble tiles — Z and Q (the 10-pointers), X and J (8), and K (5) — also catch the eye in a name. They’re beloved by the brand-name consultants who’ve coined such names as Exxon and Verizon, and they’re the first stops in the alphabet for parents who want to give their children’s names punch.

There was even a graph. I love a good graph. Almost as much as a game of scrabble.

I read this article by Savious Kwinika, Correspondent / June 22, 2010 and thought I would share it with you:

Anele Ntshinga could hardly contain her excitement a week and a half ago when she gave birth to a baby girl at Johannesburg’s Rahima Moosa Hospital just 10 minutes after the opening match of the South Africa World Cup.

As Mexico took on her beloved home team, Bafana Bafana, in Soweto’s Soccer City stadium, Ms. Ntshinga did what any mother in such a situation would do. She named her daughter “Fifa,” after the sporting body FIFA that governs world soccer.

“Is my baby really born at 4 o’clock?” she remembers asking the nurses, who nodded. “Wow, I have a World Cup baby.”

“I will be more than happy to explain it to her the day she asks: ‘Mommy, why do I have such an unusual name?’ ”

If one needed yet another sign beside the hooting of vuvuzela trumpets, the hundreds of thousands of soccer fans, the gleam in the eyes of hoteliers and restaurateurs, the extra jingle in the pockets of tens of thousands of waiters, and the empty streets at game time, then the naming of South African children with World Cup-themed names is certainly a sign of World Cup fever.

Perhaps the best sign of all is that South Africans – white and black, rich and poor – have something to be proud of, something to unite around.

The excitement is not restricted to black African families. In Bloemfontein, the heart of white Afrikaans-speaking conservatism and capital of the Free State, Charl and Riana Reinhardt gave birth to twins, whom they named “Bafana” and “Mexico.”

In certain communities of South Africa, the naming of children is an extremely important process, marking a child’s character based on the circumstances of his or her birth. Unlike Western cultures, where children often take on the name of a favorite aunt or grandparent, South African names are often descriptive of qualities to be aspired to.

In a typical day in Johannesburg, one might be assisted by a computer technician named Tolerance, tip a waitress named Beauty, do a kick-boxing class with a personal trainer named Glad, and pour over one’s bank books with a teller named Precious.

But major events, in sports or in politics, tend to witness a surge in names that come straight from the headlines. And for Africans, there can be fewer events to make one more proud than the first ever World Cup on African soil.

At Johannesburg General Hospital, the Tebogo family from Soweto also welcomed the birth of twins on the day of the opening match, whom they named “Soccer City” and “Ke Nako,” a Zulu-language refrain in local advertisements that means “It’s time.”

At Rahima Moosa Hospital, where baby Fifa is being passed around to relatives, a hospital nurse named Rosina Letlalo says, “The day will be such an unforgettable one for us not forgetting the little bundles who were born on this historic day.”

As for the other FIFA – the International Federation of Football Associations – the birth of a baby that shares its copyright-protected and trademarked name was welcomed. FIFA spokeswoman Delia Fischer says she is excited about the news.

“Thanks for letting us know and we wish the family and the baby all the best,” says Ms. Fischer in a statement. “We are excited about these names.”