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NAMES
Daily Telegraph - February 2007

I don't have children but it seems the notion of giving a kid a name for no better reason than it sounds nice trivialises the gravity of the act. After all, shouldn't naming your child require more thought than ordering food in a non-English speaking country?

In the Epponnee-rae era the names we give our children have become a free-for-all and, whether we like it or not, a marker of our class.

The irony is, of course, that those who laugh about kids in the suburbs called Kymberl-iiii are those most likely to give their child a name like Madeline or Hugo. They do so because they think these names sound distinguished, like a sofa in a Country Road homewares catalogue.

I live in the inner-west so there are more Madelines and Hugos per square metre than any other place on earth, and Isabellas are like fruit flies. I swear, I was walking through a park in Newtown the other day and when a woman in a voluminous denim skirt called for Isabella five kids dropped handfuls of tanbark and ran to get a snack of roasted eggplant.

Meanwhile, if you hear a male voice disciplining some brat called Max or Oscar it will invariably be coming from a mid-40s yuppie with a sports car, a leather jacket and the hard-living look of an ageing rock star. Except he's not an ageing rock star, he's an ageing psychologist with an advertising agency who firmly believes he missed his calling.

I regret the passing of the time when names meant something. The days when you could tell whether someone was Catholic or Protestant, for instance, by their name have long gone. Jews still have good, solid historical names. Unfortunately there are only about four of either gender to choose from, which can make conversation confusing:

“Do you know Josh?”

“Josh from Queens Park or from Rose Bay?”

“No, no. Josh from Crows Nest.”

“Does he have a sister Rachel?”

These days, few turn to the Old Testament for inspiration If you want to know what the next generation will be called turn, instead, to reality TV; judging by that the grandparents of tomorrow will be called Xena, Taylah, Saxon or Bree. I find it difficult to imagine a grandma Xena.

Bree is undoubtedly the worst of the nouveau names, if only because it is the name of my least favourite Big Brother contestant. Evoking in equal measure a type of cheese and a panel on the Dulux Colour Chart, Bree has insidiously moved into the mainstream: it is now the name of a Desperate Housewives character and a line of fake gold jewellery available from a popular direct marketing network. No child should be named after anything that might conceivably be on the Home Shopping Network.

I'm old fashioned in that I think a name should have meaning, should tie a child to a place or family and give them a sense they are part of something bigger than themselves. This is an idea with which I think most people would agree. Unfortunately, these days, that something bigger seems to be Middle Earth.