What's in a Name

In keeping with a family tradition of gender ambiguous and uncommon names, we recently dubbed the new kid Schuyler Rosemary. This has been amusing in many ways, not least that her beloved Papa misspelled her name in one of his emails to friends and family, compounding the expected confusion over pronunciation.

There wasn't a lot of discussion over this one. He proposed it, I liked it, and we were done. It may be that the man put a lot of research and thought into it, but I suspect he just liked the sound and the nautical reference. The funny thing is that according to the Social Security database, the name Schuyler has not been in the top 1000 for females in this country, ever. That's great as far as avoiding a ubiquitous (this is where you are impressed at my ability to spell big words only a week after giving birth) (here is where you wonder if I should have used "an" instead of "a" in front of it) name. Turns out though, that it shows up regularly on the boys list: without even intending to, we may have graced our little spark with a little ambiguity.

So the point of this post, the whole raison d'etre as it were (more great vocab! The mind is not totally mushy), besides the need to sit and watch as someone tries to impress me with his prowess on www.hotwheels.com, is that there is a little history behind the name, and you can find it here. In one little package, we get American history, maritime history, hospitals, prisons, and to top it off, it means "scholar" in Dutch. Perfect.