What's in a Name

COUPLING By David Valdes Greenwood - The Boston Globe: "When the month of June began, we were in the adoption world's version of limbo: the period between our home study and the day someone with a womb might take pity on us. To while away the purgatorial hours, my husband and I did the one thing we could: obsess about baby names. This is an excellent distraction tool, an endlessly amusing activity that involves no expense and can be pursued just about anywhere. (Note: The locale of brainstorming can affect the quality of the outcome. "How about `Loofah'?" I might ask while showering.)

We started playing this game a smidge early - our second date, in 1993. Despite barely knowing each other, we settled on a pair of adorable baby names, Sophie and Jonah. We knew they were perfect, a fiction we maintained through 12 years, three moves, and two weddings - both to each other - until we were actually ready to have a child, which changed everything.

Suddenly, we found ourselves haunted by our own behaviors: times we rolled our eyes at other people's baby names, sniggering at choices we deemed woefully misguided. Back then, we felt perfectly free to mock parents who named their offspring after seasons, fruits, or even car parts - but now that the baby shoe was on the other foot, we conceded that Summer, Apple, and Axyl must have sounded perfectly logical to someone.

We knew that whatever name we chose, somebody would loathe it. But at the very least, we could avoid becoming those parents immortalized in bad-name stories, funny yet horrifying tales swapped at dinner parties. For instance, I once knew a girl named Inita Mann. Her dad said he'd come up with the name because it was funny, and he figured she'd only have to endure it for 20 years or so. He was wrong on both counts; when I met her, she was in her late 20s and still walking around with a drag-queen name.

That kind of permanence got us reexamining our options. Take Jonah - good, strong name, but did we really want to evoke whale fodder? And sweet Sophie - it seemed so special until we spotted it on a list of top baby names. We were determined to go beyond the "Jennifer" and "Jason" of this era because of our own painfully ubiquitous names. There were 11 Davids on my floor my freshman year in college, three in my suite of four. And I married, yes, a Jason.

With so much free time waiting to hear from adoption authorities, we were sure we had come up with something distinct. Unfortunately, our aesthetics didn't line up very well: I'd champion some name from Cuba (which my father's family left by boat 40 years ago) while my husband countered with something WASPy (his family arrived by boat, too one full of Pilgrims). For a brief moment, our two idioms did unite in a name at once a little ethnic and yet somewhat patrician: Xavier.

It had a certain grandeur, but I began to overthink it. What would his nickname be, "X"? And wasn't it cruel of us to saddle a child with a four-syllable first name when his last name was already a two-word mouthful? The final straw was when I heard a teen mom on the subway address her Xavier in pure Bostonese. "Egg-zay-vee-uh," she crooned, dropping the "r," so the name now rhymed with "duh." On the grounds that I could not give my child a name that sounds so awful in the dominant regional dialect, I took it out of the running.

When we finally did reach an agreement on a name, we didn't dare reveal the results. The trick is never to tell a name in advance, since while many people feel comfortable expressing their dismay to future parents, no one dares insult an actual baby. Consider our friends who announced that their choices for a girl's name were Ivy, Fern, or Olive - lovely names individually but awfully vegetal as a group. Tired of the resulting commentary, the couple went with none of the above.

Recently, with little warning, we found ourselves escorted out of limbo and matched with a baby girl. With her dark eyes and mop of curls-to-be, she put an end to our name game by clearly and decidedly being Lily. I'm sure not everyone loves the name, but, so far at least, nobody's telling.

Playwright and proud new dad David Valdes Greenwood, 38, lives in Arlington. "