What's in a name?

Jeanne and I were expecting our first child and the inevitable subject of names came up. We had heard of horror stories of parents who could not agree on a name until several weeks after the baby was born and we are both headstrong people so we expected some difficulty and thought that we should get an early start on the process. However, we were surprised that finding a name went so easily for us … at least, in the beginning. Unforeseen difficulties awaited where we least expected them.

Neither of us liked the idea of a hyphenated surname, so finally we agreed that if the baby were a boy, we would give it my last name and if it were a girl we would give it her last name. At sixteen weeks, we got an ultrasound and found out that the baby was to be a boy, so then we began to search for mutually satisfactory boy names. I had always liked having an alliterative name, so I proposed that we find a B name for our boy so that his initials could be BB.

We searched a webpage called Baby Names World (http://www.babynamesworld.com/) for all the B names for boys and narrowed down to a list of six or seven names. We wanted a distinctive name that was not too popular that would convey our hopes and dreams for our child. The short list was Bentley, Berkeley, Beckett, Blake, Bryce, Brock, and Boyd. Finally we decided on Beckett. As the namesake of existentialist novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, the name seemed both artsy and solid. We liked the ring of it and the way it rolled off the tongue. It seemed like the perfect name for our child. At a dinner party a few days later, we ran the name by friends of ours—one of whom is a published poet and the other of whom is a professor of Japanese literature—and told them that we were leaning towards Beckett. They were delighted and congratulated us on choosing such a great name. This seal of approval from a poet and college professor was all we needed. We started to use the name even though we still had five months to go before the birth.

Then the second guessing began. I shared my name with my cousin and he informed me that there was a musician by the name of Beck. Our musical tastes tend more towards folk, classical, and classic rock, so when presented with the name of such a musician, I recalled that I had vaguely heard of Beck, but had never actually heard any of his music. So we rushed out to buy some of Beck’s music to ensure that we were not making a huge mistake by naming our child Beckett. More than anything we did not want to mistakenly name our baby the next “Farrah Fawcett” name—so that for the rest of his life, people would ask if he was named after some flash-in-the-pan musician. We were pleasantly surprised to find that Beck’s music was not so bad. It’s not the kind of music we will probably ever listen to again, but it was not so disagreeable that we had to withdraw our name on account of him. What is more, it seemed that musician Beck was past his peak of popularity, so it seemed that if people were not already naming their sons or daughters Beck, they were not likely to start now.

A few weeks later, my sister Linda told us about the Name Voyager at a webpage called the Baby Name Wizard (http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html), which shows the popularity of a name for every year back to the 1880’s. We eagerly searched for Beckett and to our horror found out that it has never been on this list until 2006 at which point it jumped to the rank of 758 with roughly 30 Becketts out of 410,000 boys for 2006. Was this a trend?! Was the name Beckett going to keep spiking so that by the time our child entered kindergarten half of the boys in the class were named Beckett? And where were these 30 couples getting the name Beckett from anyway? Now we had reason to worry.

However, the worst was yet to come. Jeanne was at the hardware store and as she was obviously pregnant, the subject of names came up. She told the men at the store that she was planning on naming her boy Beckett and they asked her if her husband were a Red Sox fan. Jeanne is only interested in sports she can do herself, so she skis double black diamonds effortlessly, has a mean backhand in tennis, and can easily outlast me underwater strapped to a scuba tank, but she cares not at all for such spectator sports as baseball. I usually check out the standings in the America League from time to time during the season, but do not watch any games until the World Series, and having gone to college in New York City, my loyalties usually lie with the Mets or the Yankees. Imagine our surprise to find that the Red Sox have a pitcher by the name of Josh Beckett. And not just any pitcher, but a very good one indeed. Was this where all those Becketts were coming from? Was it a Massachusetts phenomenon? Were the Red Sox faithful all naming their sons or daughters Beckett?

The whole point was to avoid the next Farrah name and here we were unknowingly contemplating naming our child with the name of the possible Cy Young Award winner for the American League. We went back to our list of names, but we had already been calling Beckett by his name for several months now and none of the rest of the names had the same ring to us. Somehow our little Beckett already seemed like Beckett even though he was not to be born for another two months. So after a few more weeks of worry, we decided to stick with the name. And as for Josh Beckett?? Well lets just say that with the way the Red Sox and Josh Beckett performed in the World Series, there is no time like the present to let Yankee pinstripe blue melt into Red Sox red. Inspired by the gift of Josh Beckett baseball card and a size one Red Sox jersey bearing the name Beckett from our seven year old friend Eric (a Red Sox fan who was not hung up on such piddling details as the origins of the name) we have purchased one Beckett jersey in each size so our little Beckett (who is named after Samuel, mind you) will have jerseys with his name on them for the rest of his life.

Note: Paul McCartney's daughter Stella has just given birth to a son (Jan. 11, 2008), and taking her cue from us, she named him Beckett. We are having an influence far beyond Amherst MA.