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10 Ways to Avoid Hipster Baby Names
How Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck bucked the current crop of clichés.
Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck should give lessons on how not to give a baby a hipster name. Their newborn daughter is Seraphina Rose Elizabeth, a name that's truly unusual (it's never been in the U.S. Top 1000), ultra-feminine, sensual as well as spiritual, familiar and yet exotic, and all-around trying way too hard to make it in the land of hipster parents.
Hipster mommies and cool dads, who claim to have a horror of conformity and a thirst for quirky individualism, nevertheless all seem to choose the same baby names. Why do parents who are making such efforts to move ahead of the crowd end up simply jumping off a groovier bridge?
Maybe it's because the only thing a hipster hates more than being seen as a hipster is not being seen as a hipster. So hipster parents know enough to bypass the too-popular Avas and Aidens favored by the great style unwashed, or middle names like Rose and Elizabeth, as standard issue as the plastic bracelet they clamp around your wrist in the hospital. But they're afraid to venture into uncharted territory in search of names that might turn out to be uncool in some other even-more-mortifying way.
The result: Every other Bugabooed baby in Brooklyn and Venice Beach is named Ruby or Oscar, Matilda or Hugo. Not, good Lord, Seraphina, which is tantamount to dressing your little girl in pink cashmere and having her picture taken wearing a little feathered halo: Too cute, and we mean that literally!
Hipster parents know enough to bypass the too-popular Avas and Aidens favored by the great style unwashed, but they’re afraid to venture into uncharted territory.
Want to avoid choosing a name that might make you—not to mention your innocent child—a hipster cliché? For specific Hipster Names to steer clear of, consult the list on Nameberry. And because hipster style is an ever-shifting target, be sure to follow these 10 Simple Rules for not giving your baby a hipster name:
1. DON’T NAME YOUR BABY AFTER A JAZZ MUSICIAN. No Ella, no Ray, no Miles. Nix on Billie, nyet on Bessie, never on Duke. And did you really think you were going to get away with Thelonious or Django? No and no. Lionel, however, is still genuinely cool.
2. NO NAMES OF GODS AND GODDESSES. We can blame the ultimate cool mommy blogger Dooce for this one. Her daughter is named Leta, which is derived from Leda, who was the mythological mother of Helen of Troy. And then, at the farmers’ market in Madison, Wisconsin, we heard a hipster dad calling to his toddler son, “Stop right there, Odin!” Zeus, Jupiter, Andromeda, and Pandora are all similarly hipster heaven.
3. AVOID THE NAMES OF HIGH-FALUTIN’ LITERARY CHARACTERS. Atticus, anyone? The more obscure and high-minded the character, the more hipster-worthy the name. So you’ll have to stay away from Scout, Daisy, Maisie, Holden and Gulliver. Soap opera character names remain safe if otherwise repellent bets.
4. AVOID THE NAMES OF HIGH-FALUTIN’ WRITERS. This is kind of a thin line. We’d say Auden, Austen, Flannery, Harper, Tennessee and Tennyson are dripping in hipsterdom; Edith, Eudora, and Ellison, still okay.
5. NO NAMES YOU MIGHT USE FOR A DOG. Prince, Duke, Max, Fifi: This kind of I’m-so-cool-I-don’t-care name should not be used for a human, even one you make yourself. Likewise do not name your dog Marian, Frederick, or Patricia.
6. IF A SUPERMODEL WOULD CHOOSE THIS NAME FOR HER BABY, STAY AWAY. Along with four-foot-long legs and cheekbones as wide as their shoulders, supermodels seem congenitally hip, and inevitably choose hipster names for their babies. (Yes, all supermodels seem to have babies.) Nameberry has a list of Supermodel Baby Names, which run toward choices such as Neva, Presley, and Sahteene.
7. SIMILARLY AVOID NAMES CHOSEN BY HIPSTER CELEBRITIES. Matilda hits the hipster list because it was chosen by hipster parents Heath and Michelle. Romy is Sofia Coppolla’s pick and Roman Cate Blanchett’s; Ramona is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s choice and Moses is Gwynnie’s. While you’re at it, you should probably not use names of hipster celebrities themselves: Isla, Ewan, Scarlett.
8. STAY AWAY FROM NAMES OF PLACES YOU WOULD NEVER GO. Okay, so Savannah and London are overplayed. Hipster parents have therefore decamped to Alabama, Indiana, and Reno. And from there it’s all too easy to wander from hipster turf into maverick territory: right, Bristol Palin?
9. DON’T PICK ANY NAME THAT STARTS WITH I OR Z OR ENDS WITH X OR O. If this whole issue is way too confusing for you, just following this one simple rule and you should be all right. Forget Iris and Isaiah. Zoe and Zane. Pax and Maddox. Nico and Orlando. Done.
10. FORGET ALL HIGHLY UNFASHIONABLE AND HIDEOUSLY UGLY NAMES. One earmark (Hi, John McCain) of hipsterism is being so hip you can be totally unhip, so cool you can give your kid a name that’s entirely uncool. Like Edna. Or Ignatius. Or Myrtle. But as important as it may seem to avoid names that threaten to turn you into a hipster cliché, it’s even more essential to stay away from those that might make your teenager try to kill you while you sleep.
Pamela Redmond Satran is the coauthor with Linda Rosenkrantz of nine bestselling baby name guides, including Beyond Jennifer & Jason and Cool Names for Babies, and a developer of the new baby-naming site Nameberry. A former fashion editor for Glamour, she is also a columnist for that magazine, writes for The New York Times, and is the author of five novels. Her children are named Rory, Joe, and Owen.
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Great advice, but all "don't". Here's a "do".
Watch a (mainstream, recent) movie you like which has kids in it. Find a kid who's nice and has an appropriate name. Put it high on your list.
e.g. "The day after tomorrow" - Sam (boy), Laura (girl).
does Maudie fit here?
I KNOW Pearl doesn't.
How to name your baby. Go the the SSA babyname page www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ and check last year's popular names. Do not choose a name from the top 50, they are too common. Don't choose a name from to deep in the list (or not listed at all) because those names are too rare. Slots 51 thru 200 are your best choices.
name your kid Mike or Kristin. easy.
Hah, I named my son Liam and my daughter Isla. To be fair, we got both of these from a Scottish baby name book.
We lose I guess.
I was at the park with my son when another boy was throwing sand at someone. He was three years old with a moussed up mohawk and I heard his mom say, "Eros, stop throwing sand!!" I thought I heard it all! She named her son after the Greek god of love and sex! Nice!
Name your child after a person you actually know and like. If it turns out to be popular he/she can just say I was named after my Uncle Ed or Aunt Edna.
Re: #9
So, no:
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DaVinci
Mario Puzzo
Mario Batalli
Paco de Luc�a
Paco Rabanne
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Neruda
Marco Polo
Marco Kreuzpaintner
We tried this formula, it might work for you: use a name of someone from your 4th grade class. For us that was Laura (now 17) and Kevin (15).
Then relax, you're probably going to call them some nickname anyway, like "Peanut" or "Doodlebug" (okay, we live in North Carolina, but you get my point).
I named my son Atticus... Does that make me a d-bag?
My daughter named her son Atticus and we all want to kill her. You don't realize what a first-grader with a name like that will have to endure on the playground. Naming a child is not an ego trip for the parent.
My daughter Leta is named after an aunt who died in infancy.
In the 1940s.
Man, I named my son Oscar two months ago, after holding onto that name as my pick for years. I was really unaware of it gaining popularity. Scar is a pretty good nickname.
I was walking around in Madison, WI this summer and heard a mother call out her children, "Jasper! Ezra!". Perfect examples.
At the restaurant down the street, every time I say my name is Kate they say "Katelyn?" No, Kate. "With a C?" No, seriously? "Some girls get so upset when we spell it with a K and it's actually a C." Yeah, don't mess with their uniqueness.
Hey NicFullofFun. Good advice, except when it's the other way around. We named our daughter Marley a year and a half before the HUGE BLOCKBUSTER movie"I AM LEGEND" hit theaters, breaking every record for a winter release.
Do you have any idea what it's like to sit in a movie theater, enjoying a film up until the point the main character explains to every person in the world why they should name their next child Marley, after Bob Marley, like we did?
To this day, upon hearing my three year old's name, we still get asked if we named her after Will Smith's daughter in the movie.
And to this day, I can no longer watch a Will Smith movie.
sad to see this author group a bunch of individuals with vastly different life experiences and styles as "hipsters" and then disrespect their children's names. yeah, i do think it's okay to name children things other than "david" and "laura". parents usually agonize over a child's name; what a shallow article. languages change over time, so do names. get with it.
i cant get over how condescending this article is! how bitter!
Sorry, dwstuck, but Pearl is totally a hipster name. Maude, too.
Name your kids after your favorite author with a normal name.
Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Or after their grandfather.
Royce, and David.
Or after your brother.
Todd
Or your favorite preacher.
Barton Stone.
Hey man, don't you know that it was the Mikes, Brittneys, Kevins and Tiffanys that beat us up in the 80's? We can't name our children after our nemeses. If our kid's names were nerdy in the 80's but popular now, then it all seems to work out eh? Who knows, with all the conforming hipsters in the world it might be the Billys and Sues that are getting made fun of. "Gosh, why weren't your mom and dad more creative? Don't they love you?".
So, what did you name your kids?
i plant to name my child something outlandish now. i find names that are different to shake up our conventional white bread surroundings. gosh, if i here the name laura or micheal one more time im going to lose hope in all originality
This is unfair to people who really put thought into the name that they choose for their baby. For example,we started an adoption process two years ago in China. In China,red is a symbol of good luck. We thought we were clever in choosing Ruby,not only for the color but because of the ruby slippers in the Wizard of Oz (there's no place like home). I never met anyone with the name Ruby,and I worked with small children. Now I do hear it all the time but our hearts are set on using it because that's the name we use to refer to her. I wish people would put a lot of thought into the name they choose so we wouldn't have the problem of hearing the same names over and over again. Her middle name will be my Mom's.
Cautionary tale about the dangers of "inventing" a name for your child...
(Situation is absolutely true--I lived it--but particulars are disguised to protect the innocent.)
Was seated across desk from car rental agent. A rather dour and unpleasant young woman of about 28 years.
On her name tag (no kidding)---Levitra.
Thank you.
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