Name Poll Analysis and Commentary

Oh, internets, how you make me laugh. The name poll did not turn out as expected, either here or with my family. Let's start with a few random points.

• Our last name is the Swedish equivalent (phonetically) of Yayer. Think Erik Gustaf. I should have mentioned that, but I didn't think of it. It starts with a G.


• Yes, Evelyn is my name (Bertha) and Linnea (Lou) is M's name. I don't think that surprised any of you, at least not any of you with the Swedish connection.


• Evalee was my grandmother's name. I like Evelyn regardless of that, but it makes it a little more special.


• Linnea is really hard to pair with a middle name, in my opinion.


• Grace is not a name that I love. I like it as a middle name, but the main reason it made it into the set of names is because it sounds quite nice with them. It was also a contender with Linnea until Sage. (We also considered Linnea Joy.)


• Here's the thing with Sage. M wouldn't agree to it as a first name, but he is agreeable if we get to use his first name. I rather wanted to name her Sage, period. So, after it occurred to me that Linnea Sage sounds good together--and I think it does--then that became fairly final as a choice. M also likes Linnea Grace, but I am lukewarm on Grace at this point. I like Evelyn Sage better, too. Also, Evelyn Grace would have the initials EGG. That's kind of weird.


• I would also like to think of a Swedish name to go with Evelyn, so it would be more fair. M doesn't really care much about this.


• Maybe most mothers get primary naming responsibility, and that is great. M and I have some co-dependency issues (which we are not at all disturbed by) and we tend to want to agree on what brand of orange juice to buy.That's just how we are. It would actually feel pretty weird to me to do it the other way.


• What do we really want to name Ducky but can't? Eowyn. But we're not going to.

We were absolutely sure that my family would go for Evelyn. Point one: it is after my grandmother. We all adored my grandmother. Point two: it is not foreign. My family is not big on the foreign. We gave them a vote and it came out 5:0 in favor of Linnea Sage. They all liked Sage, by the way.. at least after they thought about it for a minute.

We were fairly sure that the internet demographic would come down strongly in favor of Linnea. Right now, it's 16:9, Evelyn, though everyone here seems to have wanted to vote for Linnea Grace. My friends at work pretty much all wanted to vote for Linnea Grace, too. Of course, Linnea Grace isn't really one of the options for the above reason, but still. ;) Also, I'm not so sure that we ever said the first and last name out loud (duh.. we did the whole names, mostly) and as jakubicka pointed out, Linnea Yayer has a very awkward double "ay" sound in the middle. To be honest, I was leaning towards going with Linnea until this afternoon when I thought about that. M is extremely unconvinced, and claims that saying it in Swedish makes it sound okay. I remain unconvinced. If you're of the Swedish-speaking persuasion, you can let me know if you agree with him, but at the same time, we kind of don't live in Sweden, so it's a flimsy argument at best.

Everyone who works with M? Pretty much hated both of them. This could be for one of two three reasons. 1) Not the target audience--they are not necessarily people who like classic names. 2) Work environment is much coarser than friends or family. Possibly no one likes the names but are too polite to say so, whereas M's co-workers don't mind a bit of rudeness over coffee and machine guns. 3) Bad taste. ;)

So anyway, we were completely wrong as to what others would like, but I have really enjoyed the commentary. Now watch us come up with something completely different when it comes time to make it official. :) We're having fun with it now, though. It felt like an insurmountable, unfun task when we first started. It feels better now that we're pretty sure that the child will actually get a name.