What's in a name?

That which we call a rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but our daughter definitely doesn't look like a "Rose". Unfortunately, names set expectations and play a big role in how we interact with society around us, and its one of the few choices we don't normally make for ourselves. As parents-to-be, we both felt a lot of pressure to make a good choice for our daughter's name.

In many Scandinavian countries, its traditional not to name a child until its first birthday. There are superstitious origins to this, owing to a history of a harsh existence and high infant mortality, it was thought that a child with no name wouldn't show up on Death's Scrolls, literally keeping the child off the checklist the Grim Reaper would use when collecting newborns. Beyond the superstition, waiting until a personality begins to develop might be prudent when it comes to naming a child. This choice wasn't available to us, obviously, so we did our best and chose a name: Annika Grey.

With that, lets cross off a few of the usual questions we've been getting:

• Pronunciation: Annika (Ah-nih-cah), rhymes with the way most Americans pronounce "Monica" or mis-pronounce "Hanukkah" (IPA: ɑːnɪkɑː)
• Origins: Neither Annika nor Grey is a family name. We chose them both because we like the names and, in particular, the way they sounded together. Annika was Mike's contribution, Grey was Kimberley's. Both were put onto our "list of baby names" independently and we eventually arrived at this permutation after a lot of churn. For the most direct sources of inspiration, Mike first heard the name Annika as the name of Pippi Longstocking's friend Annika Settergren (and her brother Tommy) from the Swedish children's books (and movies). Grey was the name of the female lead in the movie "Catch and Release" which we happened to see while pregnant and searching high and low for baby names. No significance attached to the character, we just thought it was a pretty name.
  
• Meanings: Annika is listed with a variety of meanings, depending on where you take its origin. If you take the Swedish origin, it means "light". From a German origin, it means "Gracious, Merciful". The Hausa name Anika (pronounced Ah-ne-kah) appropriately means "Sweet Faced", and finally Annika is also listed as a derivative of the Hebrew "Anna".
  
• Grey is just a name we like. We chose the spelling Grey over Gray just because there were so many "A's" in her first name!
• Sadly, Mike cannot claim geek-cred by claiming that Annika is a sideways reference to Anakin Skywalker, nor is Grey a reference to Gandalf.
• Conversely, some geek-cred may be available that Kimberley chose "Grey" partially as a reference to X-Men comic book superheroine Jean Grey, particularly given our fervent hope that she remains a redhead. (And Mike is always optimistic that she manifests Telekinesis.) Getting Kimberley to admit this reference, however, could prove difficult.
  

Perhaps more important than the name that we did choose, is the list of rules we arrived at for ruling out a name:

• No family names. This was a tough call, as there were strong candidates from all sides of the family, but since we can't guarantee a second (or third) child to balance things out, we decided against risking offence to anyone should we choose names from one branch of the tree over another. There were several awesome choices here, but in the end, we're glad we made this decision.
  
• No trendy or popular names. Like all parents, we're totally convinced of our daughter's uniqueness and superiority in a world of other children. We were absolutely not going to saddle her with a pedestrian name. She's too uncommon a child! Growing up as "Mike, not you the other one" or "Kimberley #2 of 3" might have had something to do with it, but we really wanted to avoid anything too common. When we had our name choices down to two, the other being Zoey Fae, one of the factors that tipped us over was that one of our Pediatric Nurses at the Hospital had commented that she'd seen a recent spate of Zoey's, making it a recently popular name. Needless to say, any name that's appeared on the Top-20-Names-for-Girls in the last decade was right out.
• No "precious snowflake" names. The antithesis of the trendy name comes from the helicopter parents so absolutely convinced that the world has never seen anything like their child that the name must be completely unique. Result: Apple Martin, Pilot Inspektor Lee, etc. (Note that Mike considers Moxie CrimeFighter Jillete to be the exception to this rule. Owing to Moxie's parentage, she most likely IS going to turn out like nothing the world has seen, and by all accounts she digs the name, despite being only 4 years old.)
• No obviously geeky names. Sideways references to literature or cinema aside, we forced ourselves to omit truly geeky names. I kid you not, back in my Battlebots building days, I knew a robot builder who named his daughter Lexana because he was so fond of building robots out of the GE-branded Polycarbonate Thermoplastic "Lexan". Leia, Arwen, Alia, Elora Danon, and Buttercup were all similarly right out.
  
• No stripper names. Its mostly a joke, but we tried to follow all the usual rules and strictly avoided: names for places (Savannah, Montana, Madison, Paris, etc.), names and homonyms of cars (Mercedes, Portia, etc.), bird names (Raven, Piper, Dove, Lark, etc.), and certain names ending in -i, -ie or -y (Bambi, Lexie, Candy, etc.).