From Gadi Niram on 9/12, a link to this UK style story on yahoo!life: ‘I gave my son a baby name that’s going extinct, some people say he’ll be bullied’ by Marie-Claire Dorking on 9/9/24, beginning:
A mum has shared the reasons she decided to give her son a soon-to-be extinct baby name, despite comments from strangers claiming he might be bullied.
Casey Hennessy, 21, and her partner, Zacchaeus Harper, 25, have always been fans of more traditional names.
When they found out they were expecting a baby boy, they floated the names Winston, Axel and Finnegan but there was another moniker that came out on top… Arnold.
The couple welcomed their little boy on December 9, 2023, weighing 8lbs 3oz, and Hennessy said as soon as she looked down at her newborn she knew he was an Arnold.
“I like the idea of him having a traditional name,” the new mum, a health care assistant from, Eastbourne, East Sussex explains. “It will sound smart.
“Though we do shorten his name to Arnie to make him sound more youthful.”
BrE vs. AmE. Before I go on with the Yahoo! story, a note on an important sociocultural difference between the UK (also Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the US: in the UK etc., the given name Arnold is (in general) unmarked, with no particular associations with characteristics like national origin, religion, race, and ethnicity (so men named Arnold include patricians — historian Arnold Toynbee, composer Arnold Bax — and also an assortment of footballers); while in the US, the name tends to be associated with two groups, men of German-speaking ancestry (especially from Germany or Austria, like bodybuilder, actor, and politician Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Jewish men (like the fictional Arnold Beckoff of Torch Song Trilogy, who’s gay as well as Jewish), hence as “foreign”, and is perceived as not only old-fashioned (as in the UK), but also as nerdy, ineffectual, “queer” in several senses. As a result, in East Sussex, Arnold is a name like Winston or Axel, possibly old-fashioned but otherwise just a name; while in the US, it carries a lot more weight.
My response to Gadi Niram. In this light, consider my Facebook reply:
— AZ > GN: Amazing. I would consider changing my name to Zrnold, just to be ZZ — ooh, I could be ZZ Bottom! [playful allusion to ZZ Top, and also to the bottom and top roles in sex] — but the links to my father and grandfather are so strong, and full of regard, that I wouldn’t want to change it. On the other hand, everybody called my dad Zip rather than Arnold. Maybe I should go for Zot [my college nickname]. (I do note that I was, like, 10 the first time someone told me Arnold was a weird, stupid name for someone who wasn’t a Jew; later on, a lot of people just assumed that if my name was Arnold and I had a big nose [a reference to my notable Alpine nose], I was a Jew.)
A little more from the Yahoo! story. Casey Hennessy’s tale continues:
Hennessy gave birth to her first child Maggie, two, in April 2022.
When she found out she was expecting her second child in March 2023, she decided she wanted to give him a traditional moniker.
“We both like our traditional names, but it was so hard to come up with a boy’s names,” she says.
“I like the fact that they [traditional names] are actual names, which they can grow into. And you can also give them nicknames.
“I also wanted him to the only Arnold in his class,” she adds of her reasons for choosing the moniker.
The name Arnold looks set to go extinct alongside many other vintage names, but that didn’t put Hennessy off.
“He could have been a Winston, Murphy or even an Axel, which are the sort of names we liked but none of those names suited him.
“I instantly knew he was an Arnold, it just felt right.”
Since Arnold’s arrival, Hennessy says she gets mixed reviews from people and the moniker her and her partner chose.
While the older generation seem to like the name, commenting that it’s “lovely” and they “haven’t heard it in a while”, Hennessy says younger people can be more sceptical.
“Some people have commented that he will get bullied because of his name, which I hope will not be the case.”
But despite a mixed response the couple say they are happy they chose a unique moniker for their little boy.
“Overall we love it,” Hennessy adds.
Baby names at risk of going extinct: Monikers which were once common on pre-school registers, including Maddy, Vivienne, Bruno and Buddy, have fallen out of favour with parents, so much so that they are now at risk of becoming endangered.
According to BabyCentre mums and dads are side-stepping once-popular baby names made in favour of some more out-there monikers inspired by celebrities.
The parenting site looked at names that saw the biggest dip in ranking to compile a list of monikers that are at risk of never being used again.
Welsh boys’ names Griff and Bowen have fallen out of favour, alongside the trend for surnames as first names with Preston and Jameson slipping down the popular list.
Certain old-fashioned names have been on the rise, but others including Flo, Vivienne and Peggy have all seen a decline.
Meanwhile girls’ names with alternative spellings have also taken a hit, Zahraa had seen a rise, but took a huge tumble last year and Kiera, Alyssia and Elyse also lost popularity in 2023.
Previously on this blog.
— from my 10/7/15 posting “Adventures in Arnoldia”, on Arnoldia ‘the world of Arnolds’: the magazine Arnoldia; genera of plants named Arnoldia; place names in the US and Canada; Arnold as a family name (Matthew Arnold, Benedict Arnold, Eddy Arnold); and Arnold as a given name:
Wikipedia also has a list about Arnold as a given name. Real people: Arnold Stang, Arnold Palmer, Arnold Schwarzenegger [9/27/24 note: a list to which Arnold Zwicky, “an American linguist”, was very recently added, at the alphabetical end, of course]. And fictional Arnolds: Arnold Rimmer (a hologram character in Red Dwarf, Arnold Ziffel (Fred Ziffel’s pig on Green Acres), Arnold Zeck (the villainous character in the Nero Wolfe books). Imagine them together as the Three Arnolds — a singing group, or a comedy team, or a gang, or whatever. Arnold Stang, Palmer, and Schwarzenegger, together for your listening enjoyment. Arnold Rimmer, Ziffel, and Zeck, the dreaded Enforcers for the Mob.
— from my 3/12/22 posting “The Z of death”:
People in the U.S. today report, variously, that Arnold sounds like an old man’s name; an old-fashioned name; nerdy and ineffectual; Jewish. Many associate it with Ahnuld (Schwarzenegger). People group it with the names Arthur, Albert, and Alfred; or Ronald, Donald, and Harold (and often confuse it with one of these names). Some people think it’s intrinsically funny, like:
Eustace, Quincy, Cornelius, Zebulon, Boaz, Orson, Barnaby, Gilmore, Gaylon, Rector, Athol, Ezekiel, Achilles, Silas, Caleb, Micah, Seymour, Phineas, Zebediah
(these are, of course, matters of personal taste and experience).
… People have mocked my FN and LN separately, and together, since I was a child, which has only made me more mulish, more proud of its recalcitrant Swissness, more viscerally attached to the Z. (I usually suppress my middle name, Melchior, so as not to incite another wave of laughter, but I’m sentimental about it too, because it was my grandfather’s name.)
Very many years ago, while I was drinking some friendly beers with linguists at Jimmy’s Woodlawn Tap (by the University of Chicago), a rather drunken young man from the neighborhood decided to get acquainted with the linguist interlopers. Approached me, asked my name aggressively, got it, and broke into paroxysms of incredulous laughter. “Go on, nobody’s name is Arnold Zwicky!”, like it had to be a joke, a preposterous name I’d made up (as W.C. Fields was wont to do). Zebulon Heffelfinger, whatever. Seeing the look in my eye, several linguists dragged him away from me and told him he’d better shut up. They might even have used the magic phrase my family and friends have learned to employ in such situations: Don’t get him angry; you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.
— in my 5/26/24 posting “Further adventures in Arnoldia”, a note on the cartoon character Arnold Peck the Human Wreck, as drawn by Willy Murphy
— from my 9/24/24 posting “Gimme a Z, gimme an X”:
Footnote. To as Zot, son of Zip …
Zot — a play on the Z of my family name, from the anteater’s slurping noise in the B.C. comic strip — was, briefly, my nickname in college. And
Zip — again, a play on the family name, this time a tribute to the bearer’s amiable get-up-and-go — was my father’s nickname in college, and then he stuck with it throughout his life (my mother called him Zip); he was first-generation American, with a distinctly foreign last name and an old-fashioned, “funny” first name, so the monosyllabic Zip conjured up a colorful American (male) identity that suited him.
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