How popular is the baby name Antoinette in the United States right now? How popular was it historically? Use the popularity graph and data table below to find out! Plus, see all the blog posts that mention the name Antoinette.
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Today, let’s talk about a married couple that actually did get a divorce because of a baby name.
Audrey Payne wed Arthur Simms of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1950. About a year later, they had a baby girl. Six weeks after that, Audrey petitioned for divorce.
Audrey had originally named the baby Antoinette, after her mother.
Thereupon, she charged, her husband, Arthur Benjamin Simms III, “flew into a rage.” He’s an aircraft engineer.
Simms, she charged, changed the name to “Annette.” She changed it back.
Then, Mrs. Simms claimed, her husband hit her and tore up all the birth announcements reading “Antoinette.”
Yikes.
I’m not sure what name the baby ended up with, but an obituary for Arthur Simms mentions a daughter named Anne, and this could be his daughter with Audrey. If so, perhaps the name on the birth certificate is Annette.
…Which of the two names would you have chosen for baby Simms?
Source: “Feud Over Baby’s Name Results in Divorce.” Reading Eagle 13 Jul. 1951: 4.
Last week, I read about a Chinese woman named Lyu Yuanfang who gave birth on January 30 in Beijing. (The birth was newsworthy because Lyu, who has the neurodegenerative disease ALS, is believed to be the first ALS sufferer to give birth in China.)
Lyu and her husband, Luo Zhongmu, named the baby boy Guilong. Here’s how Luo explained the name:
‘Gui’ is another name for my hometown in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and ‘long’ represents my wife’s home province of Gansu.
What an interesting formula — a combination of two locations (each of which, in this case, represents a parent).
I’ve come across several other Chinese names that follow this formula as well.
One of them is Yinhua, the name of the baby born in 1942 to Indian physician Dwarkanath Kotnis and his wife, Chinese nurse Guo Qinglan. Guo talks about naming Yinhua in her memoir:
Kotnis asked me excitedly: Qinglan, tell me, what should we name him? I answered laughingly: Commander Nie is very considerate to us; it’s better if we request him to give the child a name.
When Commander Nie Rongzhen got to know about this happy news, he happily named the child Yinhua who had the blood of both the Indian and Chinese nations in his veins, symbolizing the friendship of the two nations. Yin stands for India, and Hua for China or flower [if pronounced in first or the parallel tone], therefore, when joined together it means either India and China or the Flower of India.
Three more I know of all happen to be named Zhongde (or Zhong-De), which is written with the Chinese characters for “China” and “Germany.”
The first I found in an essay about a a Baltic-German physician named Roger Baron Budberg (1867-1926) who moved to Manchuria as an adult. In 1907, at the age of 40, Budberg married a 14-year-old Chinese orphan named Li Yuzhen.
In March 1910, Li Yuzhen gave birth to a daughter, who received the name Zhong-De Hua, meaning “Chinese-German flower”. Despite the radical choices he had made, Baron Budberg’s identity as a German aristocrat had always remained central to him; his daughter’s Chinese name defined her as the fruit (the “flower”) of the union of what he clearly regarded as the two great traditions that together gave meaning to his life.
As an adult, Zhong-De Hua moved to Belgium and went by the name Antoinette Cecile.
The second and third were born in the wake of the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in a field hospital set up jointly by the Chinese Red Cross and the German Red Cross in the city of Dujiangyan. The very first baby born at the hospital was named Zhong-De, “China-Germany.” The fourth baby was named Xie Zhongde, which means “Thank you, China and Germany.”
Do you know of any other Chinese baby names made up of a combination of locations?
Gamsa, Mark. “China as Seen and Imagined by Roger Baron Budberg, a Baltic Physician in Manchuria.” Eastwards: Western Views on East Asian Culture. Ed. Frank Kraushaar. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. 23-35.
Did you know that certain baby names are illegal in the European country of Portugal?
The Portuguese government maintains an 80-page list of baby names — a mix of the permitted and the forbidden. Here are some of the names (and weirdly specific name combinations) Portuguese parents are not allowed to give their babies:
The top 1,000 baby girl names of 2009 can be found at the Social Security Administration’s website. But what about all the other names that were doled out last year? Those names are also available via the SSA I recently discovered (thanks Kelly!).
Just a few hours ago I posted a list of boy names that didn’t make the top 1,000 last year, but were still given to 100+ babies. Here is the equivalent (and much longer) list of girl names, grouped by the number of babies that received each name:
*Nyasia could have made the top 1,000. In fact, it should have made the top 1,000. It was given to 263 babies, just like the names that ranked 996th-1,000th (Gretchen, Karli, Kloe, Lilyanna and Mireya). But it came in last alphabetically, so in the eyes of the SSA it’s name #1,001. Sad, sad…
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