Every week, like everybody around me, I am getting older, that’s nothing new and nothing really imaginative to say as a first sentence of a post. However, with communications facilitated by social media, it seems like every week I hear the news that the girlfriend of an old friend of mine will give birth to a beautiful 9 pounds baby. Each of these times, I feel much older than only a week older since this situation is not part of my everyday life for the moment.
However, for any new parents, besides all the joy, the gifts and the baby showers which come with the newborn, there is also the hard task of choosing the baby name. And personally, how many times do you hear your friends saying the name of their baby, and you just tell yourself: “that’s so common” or “that’s so awful”! Most of the time, you stay polite and once arrived back home you have a short discussion with either your girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, dog or cat, about how the new baby’s name sounds so ugly to your ears and how the parents did a poor job of choosing the “right” name. On my side, when talking about a newborn name, as an online marketing “freak”, all types of different digitally-oriented questions popped-up to my head:
1. Is he already on Facebook?
2. What do we say about this newborn on Google?
3. Is he already tweeting?
4. With who is he/she already connected to? To celebrities or to all-star burglars?
5. Is his/her full name short enough to be typed in a tweet?
6. Is his/her name easy to recall for his/her future portfolio “URL”? Is this URL still available?
Even if my list of questions sounds more pathetic than poetic to some of you, I personally feel that the task of choosing a name for a future baby is a hard one. On a rational perspective, it’s much more like choosing a name for a new brand, you want the name:
(1) To reflect the personality of the child (which you suppose will be aligned with yours);
(2) To be unique (nearly absent when you run a research query on Google or any social media websites, see Namechk);
(3) To be common enough (so it doesn’t sound like a new planet name and other kids with get fun of it);
(4) To be easily pronounceable (similar to point 3).
What a hell of a brainstorming task! Personally, if one name satisfies each of these conditions, I would go for it. Is my name qualifying for all of these four conditions? Not really for condition 3, simply “Google” me with “Jean-Francois Belisle” and you will find out that I’m not only what I claim to be in my “Who is Jean-Francois Belisle?” page, I am also a University Professor in Latin America History at University of Ottawa, the director of the “Association des Galeries d’Arts”. Oh, I forget, I am also an author who wrote the books “Town House, Country House: Recollections of a Quebec Childhood“ in 1990, “Annie-la-rousse” in 1991, and the testosterone-packed book entitled “Parler en male” in 1999.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems like I am either positioning myself to be invited to one of these baby names brainstorming sessions or either to be kicked out from all these festivities due to my digitally-oriented point of view. But anyway, any additional thoughts on the topic? And what would my life had been if my name was Erasmus Belisle?
Jean-François Belisle
