Saturday, October 20, 2007

Name choice in the information age

When I hear new parents talk about baby names they sometimes ask a few things that I had not formerly thought of as important in a name.

They ask:
1. What is the arrangement of the initials? Are there other meanings that come out from the initials, both in first, middle, last order and first, last, middle order (the later sometimes used on monograms)?
2. Who do they want to celebrate? Family and cultural names and words are here mentioned.

How will this change in the future? Will naming a baby (already difficult) become even more so? Will it become closer to choosing a company's new brand name? Will parents avoid common computing issues, such as avoiding compound names or names with apostrophes that may cause database errors?

I ask for a number of reasons. Imagine what technological changes have done for the generation being born today. They are different in that most of them will likely not have the chance to register their name or initials as a domain name; those domains will all have been taken by the time this new generation goes online. Also, given the greater level of international focus today, will names that are difficult to pronounce in popular languages suffer? Will names that have poor connotations in other cultures suffer? Will English speaking parents adopt or find inspiration in names from other languages, such as Chinese, Hindi or Arabic just as biblical names were tailored to other languages?

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