Meridian McDaniel, 5, is named after a brand of office phone products put out by Nortel Networks, where dad Clinton is a salesman
Her given name may be traditional, but Chloe McNease of Atlanta, 11, is actually named after the perfume
Posted on 12/27/2003 4:07:43 PM PST by Holly_P
John? Doh! Try Lexus, Evian, Gucci. . . . An Infiniti of instantly recognizable names is gracing birth certificates
Meridian McDaniel, 5, is named after a brand of office phone products put out by Nortel Networks, where dad Clinton is a salesman.
Her given name may be traditional, but Chloe McNease of Atlanta, 11, is actually named after the perfume.
Anitria Akins of Atlanta had always wanted a Lexus, and now she'll always have one. She named her 9-year-old daughter A'lexus after the popular car.
"There were so many 'Alexises' out there, and I wanted something different," says Akins, a U.S. Postal Service supervisor. "I thought about naming her just 'Lexus,' but I wanted something that started with an A."
Plenty of other people have been having the same idea. In 2000, there were 1,263 girls named Alexus whose parents registered them for Social Security numbers. There were also 553 girls named Lexus, Lexxus, Lexis or Lexxis.
They're part of a growing trend toward naming children after products -- brand-name babies.
There are kids named after cars: Corvette, Acura, Camry, Celica, Infiniti. Little designers: Armani, Dior and Halston. Alcohol brand names abound: Courvoisier and Hennessy could be coming soon to a preschool near you, joining Killian and Guinness and Ronrico.
"Picking unusual names is more popular than ever, because people are willing to choose from all sorts of sources, including brand names," says Cleveland Evans, a psychology professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska who discovered the surprising number of brand-name babies in a massive database of names registered with the Social Security Administration in 2000.
Evans, a longtime member of the American Name Society, an academic group, got hold of the list, the only time the SSA has released a full list of all names given five times or more, and noticed how many products there were.
Children now about 3 years old are named Delta, Avis, Disney, Ikea, Evian, Hyatt, Breck and Delmonte.
There's a little boy in Texas named ESPN. Connie Brown of Atlanta has a granddaughter in Washington, D.C., named Cambria, after a brand of wine. It's also a type of kitchen countertop, she notes.
"Increasingly, brand names are being used as a metaphor for something else," says Lucian James, a business branding expert in San Francisco. "You say 'Gucci' to anyone in the world, and they know what you mean.
"When you're looking to name a baby, you're looking for something that sounds familiar and aspirational," he continues. "Parents are projecting onto their children the things they want to have themselves."
Not all brand-name babies are connected to luxury items. Clinton and Missy McDaniel of Duluth named their 5-year-old daughter Meridian -- but not, as most folks mistakenly think, after the town in Mississippi. Meridian is really named after a brand of office phone products put out by Nortel Networks, where Clinton is a salesman.
"I was at the doctor's office and they said, 'How do you spell that?' And I said, 'See, it's right there on your telephone,' " says Missy, a real estate appraiser.
"I didn't want a cookie-cutter name," she adds. "It's not a common name, and I wanted her to be a real individual."
Sometimes the branding is spontaneous. Jackie Henry, a retired clinical social worker who lives in Buckhead, gave birth to her son Baxter 16 years ago. The baby was premature, and she had not come up with a name yet, even after the nurses prodded her for several days after the birth.
"I'm in the hospital bed and here comes this cart down the hall with a big box on it," she recalls. "And the box says, in big letters, Baxter Pharmaceuticals.
"Now he says, 'Mom, you named me after a box!' I say, 'Yeah, but it's a good, strong name.' "
The branding of baby names is part of an overall trend toward name creativity, says Evans.
"Unusual names are accelerating, and people are being more inventive," he says. There are several naming trends, some of which have been going on for years: people naming children after places, pop culture figures and fictional characters, and parents inventing entirely new names, or new spellings of traditional names.
It's impossible to determine exactly how many children are named after products. Harley is a traditional boy's name but could also be a father's tribute to Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
Jameson is both an Irish whiskey and a traditional Irish name; Andrea and Charles Spillers of Roswell named their 2-year-old son Jameson because it was an old family name. For 11-year-old Chloe McNease of Atlanta, it's the opposite: Chloe is both a traditional girl's name and a perfume, and she's named after the perfume.
"There were 40 girls named Eternity [in 2000], and you don't know for sure, but I think it's likely a lot of that was from the perfume rather than the word," says Evans. "Dakota is a very popular name -- it's a place name and it's also a pickup truck."
It's not a completely new trend, of course. Girls have been named Mercedes for decades, and pro basketball great Elgin Baylor reportedly was named after the wristwatch company by his father.
When Virginia Hinton, a professor emeritus at Kennesaw State University, was researching a book on the history of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Milledgeville, she came across a girl named Nylic who was born around 1900. Nylic's mother was an organist at the church, and her father was the local representative for the New York Life Insurance Co. -- abbreviated NYLIC.
But there is a potential pitfall in the brand-name-baby trend, points out branding expert James.
"One of the problems with aligning your child with a brand is that your child becomes associated with the fortunes of that brand," he says. "If it's involved in scandal or has issues, that's not a good thing.
"I'd hate to think that somebody named their kid Enron four years ago."
Meridian McDaniel, 5, is named after a brand of office phone products put out by Nortel Networks, where dad Clinton is a salesman
Her given name may be traditional, but Chloe McNease of Atlanta, 11, is actually named after the perfume
Imagine how stupid A'lexus is gonna feel when she is driving her A'Geo in a few years.
So9
Sons named things like Krispykreme, Stihl, and Skoal;
Daughters named Kubota and Mopar.
Whacha think?
Actually, the Daimler Benz manufacturing Co named the car Mercedes after the daughter of their first major distributor as part of the deal for a big order.
So9
No kidding. Sheesh...and people give me funny looks when I mention that I want to name my boy "Bishop".
"Moon, y'all call yer brothers in for dinner, now!"
"Okay, Mama. Yo, Delco! I see y'all there, beatin' up on Redman! Let him up, now, Mama says dinner's on!"
"Moon, now don't forget your older brother like las' time, now!"
"Oh, Mama, Heinz don't listen none, he still thinks he'll be President some day!"
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