I recently spent some time catching up on family news. Lo and behold, it seems that I can expect a bevy of new cousins in the near future. Half of my female relatives seem to have decided that now was a good time to get pregnant, and a few others seem to have decided that now is a good to to forget to take birth control.
We’re going to need a lot of new baby names soon. I’m waiting for someone to suggest giving the children “biblical names.” According to Stephen Prothero, Jewish and biblical names for boys – “Jacob, Ethan, Michael, Joshua, Daniel, and Noah” – are very popular right now.
I’ve got a good one – Maher-shalal-hash-baz, son of Isaiah. From Isaiah 8:1-4:
And I went to the prophetess, and she conceived and bore a son. Then the LORD said to me, “Call his name Ma’her-shal’al-hash-baz; for before the child knows how to cry `My father’ or `My mother,’ the wealth of Damascus and the spoil of Sama’ria will be carried away before the king of Assyria.”
(I’m guessing that this is a poetic repetition of the famous passage Isaiah 7:14-16.)
“Maher-shalal-hash-baz” is the longest name in the bible, and it’s usually translated as something like “He has made haste to the plunder” or “Hasten to the spoil”. In other words, Samaria and Damascus are going to be sacked in short order.
If Isaiah actually did name a son this, not only was he saddling the poor kid with a jaw-breaking name, but he was turning his own son into a living stopwatch for his own prophecy. A remarkable bastard was Isaiah.
I know it’s probably not deliberate, but that could be read as implying that the women in question are either controlling or stupid, neither of which is a particularly nice thing to imply.
I don’t get the controlling bit.
Implies that their partners (assuming that we’re not talking about single women) had no say in the matter. Controlling is probably not the best word to express that, though.
I think he’s suggesting that vorjack could be interpreted as suggesting that some of his relatives deliberately didn’t take their birth control pill, pretending to have forgotten it, in order to facilitate a pregnancy they secretly desired. Thus they are controlling their partners by basically forcing the pregnancy on them.
The whole bit about pregnancies does seem an oddly judgmental way to put things, unless we’re misinterpreting the intent. Though on reflection the middle of a world wide economic crisis with the Middle East in turmoil, right wingers literally gunning for opposing politicians/voters and a seven headed dragon snacking on the sun, now may not be an advisable time to bring a child into the world.
Blast! Defeated by seconds.
Funnily enough, I was talking to my Dad about exactly this the other day. My wife and I don’t want kids, and I was explaining that the above was one of our rationales for not doing so. My Dad pointed out that it’s nearly always been that way – there’s always something new to be frightened of – and that being afraid of what we’d be asking our children to deal with in the future isn’t necessarily a good reason not to have them.
I don’t think I agree with him, but it was interesting to hear nonetheless.
Hmmm. No, there have been a few what my wife calls “oops pregnancies” in the family. As in “I decided to have a kid and forgot to tell you about it. Oops.” I’m not sure if it counts as controlling or not. But that’s not what I was getting at.
No, what I was (badly) getting at was the classic “OMG pregnancies.” As in, “OMG, I have to move back in with my parents so that they can help me raise their grandchild.” As in someone actually forgot to use birth control (or possibly the birth control didn’t work, or something similar. I’ve got suspicions that make me lean towards forgetfulness, based on my read of certain character traits, but that’s another story.)
My name (Lydia) is a Biblical name. Of course, I was named that way back when Biblical names weren’t all the rage. Hence, I spent my kindergarten and first grade years wishing I had been named “Cindy Parker”.
LOL!
Biblical names have always been the rage. Lydia is just an unusual one. Mary, Sarah, Rachel, Elizabeth, Jessica, Rebecca, and some derivatives like Lisa and Michelle were popular around the year you were born, as well as Angela and Christine/a. On the boys’ side were Michael, James, John, David, Matthew, Daniel, Joseph, Mark, and Thomas. Some of those names aren’t very popular now as the above-mentioned Noah, Jacob, Ethan, and Joshua. Popular girls’ names now aren’t so biblical, a few might be Abigail, Hannah, and Leah, but I had to go pretty far down the list and I think except for Leah, they are past their peaks in popularity – also, nowadays, if it can be avoided, popular names are unpopular with a lot of parents.
http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
Thanks, Kodie— well whatever the case may be, I didn’t really like my name until I got older.
That works really funny. My real name is more popular and I always wanted a more exotic one. Some people with unusual names would just rather blend in sometimes and feel their name is too “weird”. :) Having a popular name is no longer popular with parents – the year I was born, my name was below top ten and exactly as popular, percentage-wise, as the name in 1st place last year. And I think Lydia is on the rise, in that sweet spot, not too weird and not too popular – to me, being an adult with a currently more popular baby name is ideal compared to having what they call a “mom” name – a name that was very popular 30-50 years prior (like my name) and now that’s what all the kids’ moms’ names are.
Do you like purple?
Haha! I like lavender and alexandrite. Does that count?
That is purple to a guy.
All those biblical names you cite are so common that even among non-religious types they probably get used a lot. Many of them are actually nice and I’d be more willing to use a biblical girl’s name than a future stripper’s name. Of course for our only child we went with Alaric, which is way better (look it up.) Even when when you tell the Catholic relatives Alaric I sacked Rome in the 5th c. they don’t connect the dots.
Most people like a name and then also might like it or not mind that it is also biblical in origin. A lot of the popularity comes from just hearing it on other kids, they are not looking purposely at the bible to find names they like from it. Some people do, that’s how a funky name like Elijah somehow gets thought of as almost as ordinary as David or Joseph, and people who don’t actually look to the bible for names think it’s unusual and it might catch a wave like Noah did, such that nobody is really inferring that the parents who named their kid Elijah are super-religious any more than parents who named their kid John or Daniel back in my day, or especially Michael. They are probably nominally religious though, think of the bible as a “good book” anyway, they don’t think too hard.
It’s been done:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0991810/
And he looks so normal, too, but you know he’s bound to have “issues,” just because of the name. ;-)
I wonder if he goes by Mahershalalhash for short.
Until it’s a lot shorter than that he’ll be “Bob” to me.
A few times when people learn my name, they how Christian it is. It’s fun watching their face fall a little bit when I tell them I was named after my parents favorite song “Joy to the World” by Hoyt Axton and performed by Three Dog Night.
Crud it was supposed to be me posting that, I’m not trying to sockpuppet. :(
my sons have “biblical” names, but not because of the bible. Because we named them after people we admired who happened to have biblical names. When my daughter was born and given a name that is not in the bible, we had many question why we broke the trend. This was, of course, before we were entirely out of the closet as nonbelievers. Now, nobody questions it or mentions it. I think they’ve grown into their names and since we’re an openly nonreligious family nobody jumps to the biblical connection that exists for Andrew and Samuel.