Couples find middle ground in naming kids

Associated Press

PITTSBURGH

When it comes to naming children, there is scant “middle” ground.

From Rose to Rihanna, Andrew to Atticus, parents often go one of two ways with middle names: plain and simple or what might generously be called “creative.”

“The middle name now is doing a lot of the heavy lifting,” said Laura Wattenberg, Boston-based author of “The Baby Name Wizard,” and its fun-to-browse website, www.babynamewizard.com.

“It’s sort of your secret identity — it’s a part of you [that] you don’t necessarily want to show to the rest of the world.”

Judging by online blogs, folks are putting a lot more effort into finding that perfect name their children will probably hate by the time they’re 10.

“I think that people are moving past the idea that middle names are just sort of connective tissue between the first name and the last name,” said Pamela Redmond Satran, co-creator of www.nameberry.com, online mecca for the moniker-obsessed, and co-author of several books on the subject.

“Middle names are actually a place where people feel they can be more adventurous than with the first name.”

For better or worse, some middle names are subject to scrutiny (Barack Hussein Obama), some are nonexistent (Adolph Hitler, Harry S. Truman — the initial doesn’t stand for anything).

Some people (James Paul McCartney, Nelle Harper Lee) use it in place of a first name. Yet others have many in the middle (Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland).

Often, the middle name is chosen as a tribute. It’s a chance to honor an old friend or perhaps just suck up to rich old Aunt Martha.

And sometimes, an interesting middle name is just a happy accident. If Pittsburgh’s Dowd sisters like theirs, they can thank an officious German civil servant named Frau Prass.

City Councilman Patrick Dowd and his wife, Leslie Hammond, didn’t plan this. They were living in Berlin in 1997 on a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grant when the first of their four girls was born.

A woman at the local bureau of vital statistics would not accept their choice of Mackenzie as a proper girl’s first name.

“She said, ‘There’s an approved list,’ and that wasn’t on it,” Dowd said. A quick stateside phone call to Dowd’s grandmother convinced them to name the baby in Great-Grandma Mary’s honor, thus, “Mary Mackenzie Hammond Dowd.”

But she goes by Mackenzie.

The parents liked the idea so much, they used a similar pattern of girl name/androgynous name for the other three — Emily Quinn, Elizabeth Evan and Madyln Sloane.

“Although sometimes we call Evan ‘Crazy Betty,’ just because she’s funny,” their father said. His “MN,” incidentally, is his mother’s maiden name: Shilling.

In the case of horror novelist Joe Hill, using a middle name as nom de plume made sense. He’s the son of Stephen King, and his middle name is Hillstrom. He shortened it to use as a surname to maintain his literary identity.

At a recent signing of his “Locke & Key” graphic novels at a comic book shop in West Mifflin, Hill was approached by a curious fan who wanted to know which writer’s name was “real.”

“King is his real name, and Hill is my real name,” he said, smiling. “It just happens to be my middle name.”

Wattenberg, who is a statistician by nature, noted there are hundreds of boys out there with the middle name Anakin, as in Darth Vader, and “at this point, ‘Messiah’ is in the trendy group as well.”

Well, why not? “By this time,” she added, “I am hardly shocked by anything.”