Saw an article in the New York Times online, A Boy Named Sue, and a Theory of Names. It didn't give me too much new information; having a unique, bad, or cross-gendered name doesn't necessarily have long-term negative consequences (as research from decades past had suggested). Most significant thing I learned is that there exists an American Names Society. From their website I learned that there exists an academic field of study around names and naming practices. It's called onomastics, and it includes naming of all things, not just people... place-names, thing-names, etc. The Wikipedia article on the subject mentions a sub-branch of onomastics, anthroponomastics, the study of names of human beings, and the subject near and dear to the heart of this blog.
Even before I learned all this, I already had some doubts about some of the things I wrote in my last Name Game post - much of which I presented as statements of fact even though they're really mostly just personal aesthetics. I'll spend some time researching the given wisdom on this subject so that I might assess my own theories against those of people who actually know what they're talking about. Stay tuned.
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