blacksand
Brilliant_Rock
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2010
- Messages
- 889
I had to join this thread. I'm Lori Jane. Lori is a classic American name of the early 1960's. I was born in 1962. No problem, except for the spelling issues that I CONTINUE TO HAVE TO THIS DAY. It is such a PITA to have to spell my name to just about everyone unless I've written it down for them to see. Oh, and then there is the pronunciation of my name....it is Lori with an O....not an A...and I get really frustrated being called "Laurie" all of the time.
I remember this debate came up in a Linguistics class I took, and I still think it's funny. In my dialect, there is absolutely no difference in pronunciation between "Lori" and "Laurie." I imagine (correct me if I'm wrong) you would pronounce "Laurie" as LAH-ri? Do you differentiate between "Laura" and "Lara" in pronunciation? I do, but I learned that many people don't. It's interesting, because I always thought of Lori, Lora, Loren, etc. as just being inventive spellings of Laurie, Laura, and Lauren (and I must admit, they irked me because I am not a fan of inventive spellings), but I only recently learned that many people spell them differently to indicate a difference in pronounciation that I was previously unaware of. Dialects are funny like that. I find this stuff really interesting.
I'm big on acoustics, I guess. I don't like middle names that don't seem to fit with the first and last name. FI and his family have a lot of names that just don't flow at all. FI's middle name is Craig, which I don't hate, but it's very staccato. FI's last name is also a sharp, one-syllable word, so it's just not pleasing to my ear. FSIL has a first and middle name that just sound backwards. It would flow nicely if they were reversed, but no. My new nephew also has a middle name that seems out of sorts with his first and last name. FI wants our son (if we have one) to have the middle name Craig as well, so I guess I will have to learn to like it! Oh, well.
I'm big on language, if you couldn't tell, so name meanings are also important to me. I'd never give my child a name with a meaning I didn't like. I've seen quite a few babies named Corbin lately, for example, and I can't dissociate that name from its meaning, which is "crow". It's not a bad name, but I think of crows every time I hear it, so I could never use it. A name I actually love is Benjamin, but since I know it was a name traditionally used for the youngest son (and at least in French, "benjamin" actually means "youngest son"), I'd feel weird using it for anything other than my youngest son! FI loves it and wants to use it for our first son (if we have one), but I had to veto. I wouldn't be able to dissociate it from its history and meaning, so it would bother me. But I know most people have different priorities than I do when choosing a child's name, so I certainly don't begrudge others their own name choices!