Dear Care and Feeding: My Brother Stole Our Baby’s Name for His Son!

[dorothy1901]

Dear Care and Feeding,

My wife and I named our daughter Nola. We wanted a unique name, like New Orleans, and thought it was pretty. Six months later, my brother has named his new son Nolan, the male version of Nola. We are shocked and hurt that he picked this name without asking us if this was all right. This is his second son; if he’d always loved the name, he could have picked that name for his first son, and we would not have picked Nola. They announced the name at the bris, and everyone kept asking if it was a family name, as we already have a Nola. Are we being overly sensitive, or is it weird to steal our 6-month-old’s name? Can I talk to him about it?

—Worried About Our Good Name

Dear WAOGN,

Name stealing is not a thing. It does not matter. Please maintain a dignified silence on the subject until the sweet release of death.

As seen on Slate

Comments

[eleanorjane]

It's not a thing, but on the other hand families can be weird about it.

My dad has a not-super-common name (common enough most people know how to spell it, uncommon enough that you wouldn't expect to meet other people with your own name). My (maternal) uncle named his second son by that name - and he and his wife made REALLY SURE to tell my parents that the cousin was NOT named after my dad. Just... wtf.

[redbird]

If there are Ashkenazi Jews in your maternal uncle or aunt's family, that might be connected to the superstition against naming a child after a living relative. (The fear is that when the Angel of Death comes for the father or grandfather, he might instead take the child.)

I would expect anyone who believed in that superstition to have avoided the name, because someone who actually believed that probably wouldn't expect such an explanation to help—an angel who would confuse three-year-old Amelia with her grandmother isn't going to stop to check why the three-year-old is named that. But someone might have retained a vague "you're not supposed to name a child after a living person" without the reason, or thought "he's not named after you" would reassure someone else who was superstitious. That feels like reaching, but the whole thing feels off: if I had a sibling I disliked enough to say "not after you" for that reason, I wouldn't want to give a child (or even a pet) their name, because I wouldn't want to associate the two.

[eleanorjane]

Nope, no Ashkenazi Jews - straight up good ole Church of England on both parental sides. And the weirdest thing - the Uncle is my mother's brother, not my father's - so it was his (mild, friendly, inoffensive) B-I-L he was insulting, not even his sister!

Family is (can be) SO WEIRD. It just bemuses me.