I love the NameVoyager and its creator's commentaries. Today's mucking about reminded me of my own naming hypotheses.
For a while my hypothetical daughter's name was Ainsley Cynthia. Reading Margaret Atwood's Edible Woman in 1989 was the first time I noticed the name Ainsley, and Cynthia is obvious. I don't remember what name I planned before. (After my reading The Thorn Birds at 13 and my later falling in love with Peter Gabriel's music, my name for a boy was Dane Gabriel. CLH mocked that one hard, and I parenthesize it because yeah, what was I thinking?)
When RDC and I began thinking long-term, family names came up. In my address book are listed 11 women roughly of my generation who didn't take the name of the heterosexual partner they have children with. The children of eight have the man's surname--even the child of the unpartnered parents, even the children of parents whose names differ only in vowel, as in Smith and Smoth, but differ enough, as in Smith and Smoth, such that naming the children Smoth instead of Smith seems cruel. Then again, for another set the father's name is the preferable so maybe it's a good thing they have it. One child has both surnames, with father's last and mother's as a middle, and another set of two siblings has both their parents' surnames, in the older the father's dominates and it's the younger sibling whose mother-name dominates. For only two of my acquaintances who kept their names and had children, does the first-born child bear the mother's surname.
I like my name. I am determined and independent--marriage was going to be "Let's be independent together!" like Rudoph and Herbie--and my hatchlings would have my name. My potential husbands' names had been, serially, diminutive, inelegant, difficult to enunciate, and now hard to spell and pronounce. Even as we realized that hooray, the other person didn't want children either, we argued about names (name and arguments being fun). At that point, the hypothetical (except certainly singleton) child's name was going to be either Bly David or Bly Cynthia. Bly is pleasantly androgynous so worked for either and was a family name of RDC's to balance my insistence on my last name (a point which I had not won) and David has long my favorite boy's name as well as also a family name of RDC.
My first dog's name is going to be Phoebe, so it had better be female. Recently I've favored more unusual names, and a series of hamsters should get these names out of my system (as should the mere consideration of hamsters). Mathilde. Aloysius. Maebh. Evelyn. Malachi, nicknamed Dactyl. Oo, that could be my next bird's name (because parrots have zygodactyl feet). And if I named a dog Evelyn, around its neck instead of a bandana I would have to tie a special doily with quivering fringe. Er. Not after reading Dogs of Babel and deliberating not reading Lives of the Monster Dogs could I name a dog anything implying modification, further or otherwise.