She gave birth to a baby girl–her seventh daughter–just a few minutes later.

After the birth, the cooking students helped Diane and her husband choose a name. Here’s how Diane explained it:

They were saying that we should name her after something we were cooking, and someone jokingly suggested cabbage patch, but someone else said ‘pearl’ after a kind of barley we were cooking, so we picked that for a middle name.

The baby was named Kristen Pearl.

(According to Diane’s bio on the Kushi Institute faculty page, she has eight children. I’m really curious to know if baby #8 was a boy or a girl.)

Sources:

• “Class Gets Real Childbirth Lesson.” Tuscaloosa News 20 Sept. 1984: 3.
• “Good thing the cooks could boil water.” Wilmington Morning Star 24 Sept. 1984: 2C.

(Want to see other baby names in the news?)

The plan is to use the babies’ grandmothers’ names, Eileen and Patricia, as middle names. So Bridgette and her husband are interested in names that sound good in front of either Eileen or Patricia. (Especially Patricia–that’s the one they’re having a hard time with.)

Here are the names currently under consideration:

Bridgette and her husband like different types of names (i.e. one likes unisex, the other prefers feminine, etc.) so it sounds like they’re open to all sorts of suggestions–so long as the suggestions work with Eileen and/or Patricia.

Finally, here’s a cute observation Bridgette made:

Husband’s mostly Irish and says he’d like an Irish name, but seems to gravitate toward French sounding names.

Sounds like she knows him better than he knows himself. :)

Here are some of the name ideas I had, to kick things off:

*It’s the birthstone for October, so I had to throw it in.

Which of the above do you like best? See any good pairings? What other names and name pairings would you suggest to Bridgette?

(The mother of baby Alicia, born 12 days late and named after Hurricane Alicia, had used similar reasoning.)

Source: “Mom names baby for Elena.” Gainesville Sun 31 Aug. 1985: 2A.

(Want to see other baby names in the news?)

The hurricane, which entered Virginia later that day, went on to become one of the costliest disasters in the state’s history.

Source: “Residents Commemorate, Cope with Storm.” Virginian-Pilot 20 Sept. 2003: B5.

(Want to see other baby names in the news?)

The hurricane made landfall near Galveston just a few hours after baby Alicia was born.

Source: “Alicia Gets Namesake.” Victoria Advocate 19 Aug. 1983: 10A.

(Want to see other baby names in the news?)

One of the babies belonged to Linda Cowell of Newport News. “Everyone in the shelter was saying if you go into labor, you’ve got to name her Gloria,” she said. And so she did.

The other belonged to Gloria Davis of Virginia Beach. During her pregnancy, her husband hadn’t been too keen on passing Gloria’s name down to a daughter. But when their baby girl happened to be born during a storm with the very same name, he relented.

Sources:

• “Gloria Leaves Two Little Namesakes.” Miami Herald 29 Sept. 1985: 6A.
• “Gloria’s Lighter Side.” Evening Independent [St. Petersburg] 28 Sept. 1985: 3-A.

(Want to see other baby names in the news?)

Hazel, for instance. Hurricane Hazel struck Myrtle Beach, South Carolina on 15 October 1954. The next day, a Rock Hill newspaper reported that a doctor had been “called out and delivered a baby” in Myrtle Beach during the hurricane and that “[t]he baby was named Hazel.”

I’ll have to dig through my files for the other hurricane names…

Source: “Hazel Gets Namesake.” Evening Herald [Rock Hill, NC] 16 Oct. 1954: 1.

(Want to see other baby names in the news?)

But we can’t stop at boy names. That wouldn’t be fair. So here are the top 20 girl names reordered according to relative femininity. (For this post, “strongest” refers to how strongly feminine a name is, just as in the last post it referred to how strongly masculine a name was.)

The degree of femininity was determined by comparing the number of girls with each name to the total number of babies (male + female) with each name. The more boys with the name, the less feminine I considered it.

Most of the names on the reordered side were used by girls over 99% of the time, so they’re all about equally feminine. (Any difference between them is probably due to coding errors.)

The two exceptions are Addison and Alexis:

So if you’re looking for a girl name that won’t be mistaken for a boy name, most of the names in the top 20 are safe bets–but you may want to stay away from Addison, and you’ll definitely want to avoid Alexis.

On 13 October 1993, almost a decade later, Donald Trump and Marla Maples had a baby girl they named Tiffany. Here’s what Trump had to say about Tiffany’s name:

Everything involved with Trump Tower has been successful. And Trump Tower was built with Tiffany’s air rights. But I’ve also always loved the name.

Tiffany was originally an English surname belonging to Charles Lewis Tiffany (1812-1902), co-founder of Tiffany & Co. It was based on the medieval female personal name Tiffania, which can be traced back to the Greek name Theophania, comprised of the elements theos, “God,” and phainein, “to appear.”

The name became popular in the U.S. following the release of the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). It was one of the top 100 girl names in the nation from 1970 until 1999.

Journalist Walter Shapiro wasn’t too keen on Trump’s choice back in 1993. “How much more tasteful had the parents simply explained that Tiffany rhymes with epiphany,” he wrote. He also gave us these prophetic lines:

Picture a kindergarten of the future as the teacher calls the alphabetical roll: “Armani, Burberry, Cartier, Fendi, Gucci, Hermes…” all the way down to “…Valentino, Vuitton and Zabar.” Instead of superhero lunch boxes, these kids will tote personalized shopping bags.

That future is getting closer, Walt. In 2009, hundreds of babies were named Armani and Valentino. Dozens were named Cartier and Hermes. Many more were named Alize, Chanel, Hennessy, Lexus, Sephora…

Sources:

• Boyle, Robert H. “The USFL’s Trump Card.” Sports Illustrated 13 Feb. 1984: 53-63.
• Brozan, Nadine. “Chronicle.” New York Times 14 Oct. 1993.
• “Donald and Marla have a baby Tiffany.” Reading Eagle 13 Oct. 1993: A10.
• Shapiro, Walter. “The Importance of Being Tiffany.” TIME 15 Nov. 1993.
• “Tiffany.” Dictionary of American Family Names. Vol. 3. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Photo: love janine

As with several other saint names (like Theresa, Katherine, Anthony, Ignatius and Casilda) no one knows for sure what Monica means. Author Garry Wills believes “its proper form is Monnica, related to the old Libyan god Mon, who was worshiped in nearby Thibilis.”

According to Ask Oxford, “in the early Middle Ages [Monica] was taken to be a derivative of Latin monere ‘to warn’, ‘counsel’, or ‘advise’, since it was as a result of [St. Monica's] guidance that her son was converted to Christianity.” This is similar to the way Veronica, a form of Berenice, later became associated with the Latin phrase vera icon, ‘true image.’

Monica is “the only Berber name commonly used in English,” according historian Michael Brett and archaelogist Elizabeth Fentress. It was among the top 100 baby girl names in the U.S. from the mid-1960s through the late 1990s, but began to fall out of favor right around the time of the Lewisky scandal. Currently, Monica is ranked 340th.

The double-N version, on the other hand, has always been extremely rare. Monnica’s best showing was in 1976, when a whopping 10 baby girls were given the name.

Sources:

• Brett, Michael and Elizabeth Fentress. The Berbers. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997.
• Wills, Garry. Saint Augustine. New York: Viking, 1999.