> No one one wants an odd-sounding name

Odd-sounding name are specifically what I looked for when naming my daughters. No one wants a banal name !

Parents like odd-sounding/-spelt names for their children. Often the children, when old enough, are not quite so on-board with having to spell their name multiple times in any situation in which it helps to transmit it to others. When none of your friends can spell your name, and everyone in your locality pronounces it wrong when reading it, then Diarmaid, your parents - IMO - chose poorly.

Of course that raises the question of translation, transliteration, and language specific names (first-language Chinese speakers in the UK seem always to have a Western name - my friend says she got hers from her English teacher).

Funny thing is, I actually got to pick my name as an adult (I'm transgender).

I made sure that my new first and middle names were both common for my birth year. Both names were in the top 20, and my middle name was actually #2.

I actually did consider an uncommon name for my middle name, though. In fact, the name I was considering wasn't so much uncommon as it was unheard of outside of fictional characters. I figured I could have a normal name as my first name, go by that, and only write out my middle name if I wanted to have some fun. Ultimately, though, I got cold feet. I was worried I'd regret it if I picked a name, even a middle name, that called so much attention to me, and I ended up using as a middle name a name I'd previously considered for my first name but ended up very narrowly rejecting.

It worked out for the better. I like my initials better the way things ended up: AJB forms a nice three-letter ligature, while ASB doesn't. And I have a good pen name that I've started using on occasion for projects I don't want to use my real name on (e.g. anime fansubbing).

I have a lovely story from a friend of mine from France. He was christened with a very ordinary first name but no middle name. He always felt that he'd missed out on a middle name. Well, about the age of 10 he started to pester his parents to be allowed to have a middle name. They agreed that if he could choose one and he didn't change his mind, he could have a fully legal middle name for his 16th birthday. Sure enough, he chose a name immediately and stuck to it. And that is why the middle name on his passport, driver's license, tax return and bank statements is Crocodile.

> No one wants a banal name !

A lot of people do. Not saying this is the case here, but picking unusual names can be unwise and harmful to children [1][2][3]. Please be careful and considerate of what your children might think in the future.

[1] https://www.parenting.com/baby-names/name-advice/why-picking...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting/all-parents-sho...

[3] https://nypost.com/2017/05/12/your-babys-unique-name-might-r...

> No one wants a banal name !

Someone clearly wasn't an introverted 6th grader whose dream was to have no one notice them for the entire school year.

I recommend that parents give their children ordinary-sounding first names and interesting middle names, and then call them by their middle name colloquially and let them use their first name for banal tasks such as government forms and job applications, or if they decide they don't want to stand out. :)

I really like that. In interviews they are Robert, and at home they can be Percival if they want.

So true...I was "Brett" growing up and to this day the number of "Brett"s I've heard of is less than a dozen.

As a kid I loathed it and promised myself I'd change to a nice "jim" when I was old enough. Not only was I a victim of bullying and felt my name made me stick out, but the kids would call me "Brat" while the adults used "Brent" or "Bret", and I truly thought the unusual name made it all worse.

As an adult I don't particularly like my name, but I do appreciate being unusual. When another "Brett" does show up in conversation or text, I take a second to realize it isnt about me. (The current US supreme court nomination has been less than fun in an extra way for me)

I cant imagine how different it must be to have a common name and default to assuming that your own name probably means someone else.

I used to sit next to a Bob Smith, and everytime he called someone new on the phone for work (we did that back in the day) he had to follow up with "no, for real".

In 4,5th,6th grade my plan was to change my name to the letter ‘X’ when I grew up. “ that’s soooo coool!” plays some mega man

I love a good name, one that is spelled such that many/most native speakers of the language will pronounce it approximately correctly when they see it, and isn’t too difficult to spell, but also lets a person feel a baseline differentiation - to not be drone#6472567.

I am <banal name>#4235862, and I DO find that annoying. Often cannot even differentiate me from the many holders of my name by adding my last initial, or even my entire last name.

Grass is always greener, I guess. I would love to be unsearchable on the Internet. There are fewer than five people in the world with my name as far as I know. One of them, younger than me, did start playing college football about a decade ago and all of a sudden took over the top search results, which was good, but it's still pretty easy to distinguish us with any kind of real search.

(My first name is nothing unusual, this is due to my last name. I gave my kids what I would consider fairly common first names, though again due to the last name there are only a few others of each.)

I really get pissed when popular software takes on humann names. Like for example , the name “Siri”, Alexa, Cortana are all dead names now and the poor souls who are named that right now!!! Also people named Jason who work in tech (.json files)

I wasn't aware Cortana was ever a human name.

I find "Jason" hilarious because I have multiple coworkers with that name... I wonder how often they turn their heads whenever someone talks about JSON. Fortunately, where I live, almost everybody pronounces JSON with stress on the second syllable (jase-ON / [d͡ʒɛɪs'ɒn] or [d͡ʒɛɪ'sɒn]) so it's not quite a homophone. I have a friend who works for a company where people actually do pronounce JSON like "Jason", and he's ranted to me so many times about how the way his coworkers pronounce things is weird (he's also ranted about how they pronounce "epoch" like "epic").

And at least Siri isn't used much in the Anglosphere... I still feel sorry for people in Nordic countries who can't use that name anymore, but I honestly didn't even know it was a human name until after the Apple product came out.

Oh, and my cousin has a kid named Alexis. Somehow, I have a feeling that they will never ever get an Amazon Echo. It would be too awkward if Alexa pipes up whenever she's trying to talk to her kid.

I think you can change a setting to get the Echo to reply to "Amazon", "Echo", or "Computer" instead.

The problem that one finds is that suddenly many parents want the same odd-sounding names for their offspring. My parents never had classmates named Lisa, but I had plenty such. There were no Caitlins around when I was in school, but there were a lot when my son got there.

I have a hard time thinking of comparable trends in boys name--I suppose Justin was one that was suddenly popular around 1990.

I've usually heard Tyler as the boy's name that goes hand in hand with Caitlin.

I'm very glad I have a common ("banal") name, I don't want to stand out for the wrong reason. I don't want to come off as uneducated and unemployable (like it or not, and for whatever reason, people with uncommon names are less educated and have lower employment). With a common name I'm noticed and remembered for my personality/attributes and not my name.

Yeah, but you have to admit "Chlamydia" has an exotic Mediterranean sound to it. ;-)

Exotic names are your parents expressing themselves through you, when you might prefer to express yourself... yourself.

IMO banal names from different time periods that still work today are best.

> Exotic names are your parents expressing themselves through you

All names are your parents expressing themselves through you.

I also fail to see how one can no longer express themselves due to a given name.

> All names are your parents expressing themselves through you.

I mean that parents can restrain their self-expression by picking an inconspicuous name.

> I also fail to see how one can no longer express themselves due to a given name.

OK, I overstated my case. I was only referring to the name drawing unwanted attention at first impressions (maybe not even meeting in person).

Plenty of people do. My first and middle names are 2 of the most common men's names for the last 40 years and I'm fine with that. Your daughters may well grow up agreeing with you or resenting you. If you'd named them Jennifer and Mary they may have thanked you for not leaning into a trend and picking something stupid like Apple, or they may always yearn to be unique and different.

TL;dr- YOU don't want a banal name for your children, but you have no idea how that's going to work out long term.

I have a depressingly banal name and have experienced pretty serious annoyance about it. I wouldn’t say depression, but when society already makes me feel like a faceless drone, being <banal name>#476 exacerbates the problem substantially.

Soon there will be many young Bernards and Doloreses running around. Hard to wrap your head around.

My two-year-old grandson Henry has that Shakespearean king look already.

Many two-year-olds do.

My father's parents: Wilbur and Cleytus, the latter of which doesn't even show up in babynamewizard.com.

I don't think those will be back in fashion any time soon.

Cletus, of which Cleytus may be a variation, has a long Christian tradition going back to the third Pope, St. Cletus (also known as Anacletus, which makes me wonder if his evil twin was named Katacletus).