Name writing

New post up at Nameberry!

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I’ve got a post up at Nameberry today on Marian names! Marian Names Way Beyond Mary, Marie and Maria!

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(Nameberry co-founder Linda Rosenkrantz gave my book a wonderful endorsement, chose this beautiful picture for the post, and has just generally been wonderful and supportive, I’m so grateful to her!)

My book, Catholic Baby Names for Girls and Boys: Over 250 Ways to Honor Our Lady, is now available to order from ShopMercy.org (it ships free through May 12!) and Amazon! It’s a perfect Mother’s Day gift, as well as for baby showers and just because. If you feel moved to leave a review on Amazon, it would be greatly appreciated. 🙂 ❤

BIG NEWS!!

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You guys! I am SO EXCITED to share with you a very special announcement:

I’m having a book published! A book of Marian names! Ahhhh!!

I’ve been researching and compiling Marian names for nearly ten years — with a good amount of help from all of you via our conversations on the blog! — and I’m so thrilled that Marian Press (publisher of Fr. Calloway’s and Fr. Gaitley’s books, among others) has agreed to publish it!

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It’s entitled Catholic Baby Names for Girls and Boys: Over 250 Ways to Honor Our Lady — yes indeed, names for boys too! It will be available for purchase in May (month of Our Lady!), and I’ll have more details for you in the coming weeks. It has turned out amazingly well under the guidance of the team at Marian Press, if I do say so myself. 😊

Writing a book is one of the dreams of my life, and you have to know that writing one that honors Our Lady, and has to do with names, is a greater gift than I could ever have imagined.

This is such a big week, with the announcement of our baby-on-the-way followed by the announcement of my book! God is so good. ❤️

Sneak peek of my contribution to The Catholic Hipster Handbook!

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First off, thank you all for your lovely birthday wishes!! I had a wonderful day, and discovered that Arwen‘s birthday was also yesterday! Happy birthday to her, and to all of you and your children who were born on August 23/feast of St. Rose!

Secondly, and the point of this post: the time for the release of The Catholic Hipster Handbook is drawing nigh!! It releases on September 22, but I’m pretty sure if you preorder it you’ll get it sooner than that.

You might have seen that Tommy Tighe (Mr. Catholic Hipster) gave a sneak peek of my chapter at the beginning of the month — I can’t wait for you to read the whole thing! (He was using an older draft — I’m confident that my last name will be on it when it’s published, and the typos will have been fixed. 🙏) And don’t forget all the other amazing authors who have contributed to the book, including Sister Brittany Harrison, Lisa Hendey, Arleen Spenceley, Anna Mitchell, Mary Rezac, Melissa Keating, Matt Dunn, Sarah Vabulas, Fr. Kyle Schnippel, Steven Lewis, Tiffany Walsh, Sergio Bermudez, and Leticia Ochoa Adams, and the foreword written by Jeannie Gaffigan — lots of favorites here!

And of course — the cover. I’m still dying over being in a book with him on the cover. ❤

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Thanks for bearing with my shameless plug! I guarantee you won’t be disappointed to have The Catholic Hipster Handbook in your library! 😊😘

New articles up at CatholicMom and Nameberry

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My recent post about the alleged lack of naming after women and moms inspired me to write two different articles on different aspects of the conversation — one for Catholic Mom and one for Nameberry. Both are now up! Check out Gender inequality in naming? at Catholic Mom and Why So Few Girl Juniors? at Nameberry. I’d love to hear your thoughts on both articles!

 

 

 

Article on saints’ names up at Nameberry today! And that St. Anne!

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I have a new piece up at Nameberry today! Usually I try to stick to low to zero Cathtasticalness in my Nameberry pieces, but Pam asked me if I’d write an article on cool and unusual saints’ names, which was awesome of her and exciting for me, and I’m really pleased with how it came out: Best Cool, Unusual Saints’ Names.

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(It goes without saying, of course, that I don’t actually think these are the*only* best cool, unusual saints’ names — there’s an invisible “Some of the” before “best” in that title.)

And that image! Pam chose it — a peg doll of St. Zelie! — and included the bit at the bottom about the SaintAnneStudio on Etsy — can it be mere coincidence that she chose a shop named after St. Anne without any knowledge that St. Anne is our patroness?? That St. Anne! Up to lots of good!! 😄❤😄❤😄❤

Speaking of St. Anne … my second blogiversary is Monday (I know! What!) and we all (my hubs and I and the kids and my brother-in-law) are taking a mini pilgrimage to a St. Anne’s Shrine on Sunday (different one than we visited last year), during which I’ll be thanking her for her intercession and patronage, and praying for all of you and your intentions! If you’d like to send me your intentions, whether in the comments below or via email (sanctanomina@gmail.com), I’d love to take them with me. This will be a mighty efficacious trip, since “traveling with the kids” is no where on my Things I Love About Motherhood list, so you can be assured the graces will be a-raining down upon you! 😁

I’d love to hear what you think about my Nameberry piece, and don’t forget to send me your intentions!

Sancta Nomina around the web, and Happy Easter!

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My March column at CatholicMom.com posted last Wednesday, and I’m only now getting a chance to let you all know! As you’ll read, it was inspired by the fact that search terms having to do with nicknames for Victor bring people to my blog more than any other search term, except for those specifically looking for the blog (e.g., “sancta nomina blog”). I still find that pretty amazing!

You might remember that I’d done a consultation last year for nicknames for Victor for Theresa of Zelie & Co./Happy Nest Home Goods fame, so I re-tooled it a little for CatholicMom and I’m delighted I was able to have it post right before Easter as, to me, Victor is all Jesus and His triumph over death: Celebrating Jesus’ Easter Victory By Name

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And today, I have a new article up at Nameberry, which was greatly helped by the comments you all left on this post! Check it out: How Star Athletes Influence Baby Names

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With that, I’m signing off until next week, when I’ll post the Monday consultation as usual (for one of our most regular readers! So exciting!). I’ll remember you all in my prayers over the next few somber and celebratory days, and I hope you all have a very blessed Holy Week and a wonderfully Happy Easter!! ❤ ❤ ❤

Happy Independence Day!! And a question

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I know no one’s reading today, so I’ll probably reblog this later this week, but just in case someone’s looking for something namey to read on this great day and some questions of life-altering import to consider (ha!), here ya go. 🙂

We all have strong opinions regarding names, yes? We all have our tastes and styles, we like what we like. All of which is totally fine, since, as long as we’re not talking about Lucifer or Eva-Braun (hyphenated double first name thankyouverymuch), names are not a moral issue. We’re free to disagree! You can like John and you can like Hezekiah and you can like Kayden and none of it has a lick to do with your worth as a person or how much you love your child or whether you’re a good parent or not or your status before God.

I’ve found that the more conversations I have in which I find out why parents chose the name(s) they did for their child(ren), the more and more obvious it is to me that parents in general choose names for their little ones that they love. Names that really sing for them, that make them light up with joy that yes! This is the name for my child, my beloved.

Now I do think sometimes it’s a kindness to point out to parents trying to decide on a name for their unborn baby if there’s a glaring issue with a name. Like, if you knew parents were considering “Tiger” and you knew there was a chance they didn’t know about Tiger Woods as a celebrity personality, nor as a person with some negative associations due to unsavory information about his private life that was made public, I would think it important to find a quiet moment to gently point it out. Then, once it’s pointed out, you’ve done your job! No need to harp on.

Criticisms of a child’s name after he or she’s already been named? So uncool. So unkind.

I was thinking of all this because I received my very first negative comment!! Not here (as if! You all are so wonderful ❤ ) — over on my Nameberry post. In one few-sentence comment, (1) choosing names like the ones I’d written about was declared “tacky” and “chavvy” and (2) I’m pretty sure our country was one of the “certain countries” said to be “on the decline” intelligence-wise because of, I assume, some of the names American parents have chosen for their children. Ha!

I honestly truly do not care about disagreements in names. I do find it very sad that anyone would feel the need to throw parents and entire countries under the bus because of disagreements in names. I don’t have any interest in engaging in conversation with people who have such opinions, because I would imagine there’s some hurt there, and I don’t want to be the (even inadvertent) stick that pokes at a sore spot. Like when my kids are just totally beyond keeping it together, they often need extra softness from me. But it did make me want to ask you all:

What do you do when you know someone’s considering a name for their child that you think is unfortunate? If there’s a real issue with the name (like some obvious negative connotation), do you point it out? If it’s just a name that’s not your taste, do you tell them? Do you have real-life experiences like this, and how did you handle it? OR — have you been on the receiving end?

Have a wonderful 4th of July everyone!!

“Land where my fathers died! Land of the pilgrims’ pride! From every mountainside, let freedom ring!”

Eleanor=Helen after all?

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I have long been familiar with the idea that Eleanor is actually not related to Helen, despite the fact that Elena and Ellen actually are Helen variants and Eleanor seems like yet another of those, no? Behind the Name, which I take to be the best and most trustworthy online source of name meanings and etymology, says this about Eleanor:

“From the Old French form of the Occitan name Aliénor. It was first borne by the influential Eleanor of Aquitaine (12th century), who was the queen of Louis VII, the king of France, and later Henry II, the king of England. She was named Aenor after her mother, and was called by the Occitan phrase alia Aenor “the other AENOR” in order to distinguish her from her mother.”

I even referenced this “fact” in my article at Nameberry about how the intention behind the choosing of a name matters more than the actual meaning of the name, using as an example one of you dear readers who had named her daughter Eleanor for St. Helen and then was horrified to discover months later (after the birth and after the naming) that Eleanor is not believed to be a variant of Helen. (Add to the confusion that in the Eleanor entry at Behind the Name, Ellen is listed as the short Dutch form of Eleanor. This is different than the English usage of Ellen, which is as a variant of Helen. Oh dear.) (Hence my assertion that if the mama wanted her daughter to be named for St. Helen, and she genuinely believed Eleanor to be a form of Helen, then then baby *is* named for St. Helen.)

THEN, I was checking in with the Baby Name Wizard forums the other day, and came across this:

“So a mention in another thread of the probably spurious etymology for Eleanor as “the other Aenor” from Alia Aenor reminded me…”

Wait a minute, what?

Of course I had to find the other thread with the “mention” of the “probably spurious etymology for Eleanor” (I’m sorry but “mention” is too casual a word for this rock-my-world bit of info), and indeed found this:

“… K.M. Sheard’s Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Names (with the very long subtitle) … says (any typos mine): ‘Although Alianor is almost certainly a medieval Provencal form of Helena, there is an outside chance that its origins are actually Germanic — being possibly one and the same with Aenor. Alianor is often said to be the source of Eleanor, and the two were often used interchangably in the middle ages; the English Queen Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, for istance, was known as Alienor in Aquitaine. Her mother’s name was Aenor, and folk-etymology likes to derive Alienor from a combination of L: alia “another (female)” + Aenor. This play with words may have been in the minds of her parents, but it is not the source of either Alienor or Eleanor. Both had already been in use for at least a hundred years at the time of her birth; Eleanor of Normandy (c. 1011-aft. 1071) was the aunt of William the Conqueror, while the wife of the tenth-century Aimery II de Thouars, was called Alienor. Thus the superficial “other Aenor” meaning can only really have been an influencing factor in the naming of the Duchess. Such thinking is often a factor in choosing names today and there is no reason to suppose that things were all that different a thousand years ago.'”

Color me flabbergasted. And ecstatic!!! How fabulous that there’s actually a legit and reasonable argument in favor of Eleanor being a Helen variant!!! What do you all think??

(And now I’m off to think some more about that book by K.M. Sheard referenced above, which I’ve long been intrigued by, but so put off by its title: Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Names: For Pagans, Witches, Wiccans, Druids, Heathens, Mages, Shamans & Independent Thinkers of All Sorts. Yeah. Bet you never thought you’d see those words on this blog! The commenter, whose thoughts and insights about names I always really enjoy and respect, made a point of saying, “I have been enjoying this book, for what it’s worth. I was initially a bit put off by the subtitle … but I’m glad I got it!” And a review on Amazon says, “Definitely not for Pagans only, this scrupulously researched volume covers a wide range of names, from the traditional, Old Testament Benjamin to the medieval French Goddess name Bensozie. A wealth of onomastic information.” That description just makes my mouth water … If I could actually consider myself an academic onomastician I would definitely need to have it, but as a mom of littles? I just don’t know if I could in good conscience let a book with that title in the house with all my still-forming boys. Maybe if I paper-bag-covered it? Like a school textbook? Or maybe I should look at it in the library … Have any of you read it? I’m such a sucker for good meaty name books with lots of info and commentary …)