Your website has been my salvation in my search to try to name my second child before my husband and I divorce over it.

Jenny A named a child Bayne??? As in “this child is the bane of my life”?? My OED defines bane (admittedly not Bayne, but who wants to spell things right, anyway) as “cause of trouble or ruin”, as in the curse of having to give children increasingly awful names.

My recommendation is that these parents leave the naming of children to their other children, who, on the face of present evidence, would do better at it. We reckon our two year old, Harlan (OK, OK, not the most common name in the world but (a) we didn’t make it up and (b) you can spell and pronouce it), will choose to name our second son “Apricot Bang Run”, being his favourite words. At that stage I hadn’t realised that someone on your website was going for Run already….. out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, huh?

The best names I came across were those children I taught at a school in New Delhi when I was 18. The absolute best was Baby Rhythm, and I have since wondered what she did during her years of trying to be a bolshie teenager, and how this will affect her future attempts to be a leader of industry…. “Baby Rhythm is a tough negotiator” “Baby Rhythm demands a bonus to sort out the company’s infrastructure”, it doesn’t really work unless you’re four, really, does it?

My husband, who is the son of two Irish immigrants, snears at length about the trend for these mad Irish/Gaelic names and spellings that are now very trendy in Britain. Gaelic was rarely a written language (and frankly for many centuries hardly a used language at all, unlike, say, Welsh) for a long time and these completely non-phonetic spellings are to an extent a great joke by the Irish on everyone who wishes to prove their Irish ancestry or are attracted to the Irish culture (of enjoying yourself, drinking a lot, singing, dancing and all planting the same species of potato). All these Niamhs and Siobhans don’t particularly fit an Irish pronunciation of those letters, but it does make people feel different to give their child a name neither they nor their teacher will be able to spell. Which really will help them not be confused about the sounds that letters make. May be it’s a plot to stamp out literacy…..

Thank you for giving us all some perspective on the great naming crisis.

-Rosalind, U.K.