Do you like your grandchild's name?

Nope,that doesn't count.

Is that your real name then Jalima?
No, but I did pick it for my username which must mean I am bottom of the class and a chav

Harper was apparently a girl's name 89 years ago in America (Harper Lee). Perhaps the Beckhams' daughter is named after her. Sorrow was a baby in Tess of the D'urbervilles. I saw Biggles in a boy's birth announcement in The Times once, and thought it a little unwise.

I think maggie that it's a different case entirely if the child is of any other ethnicity than white British.You would expect a different name in that case.

And as for teachers doing so....well. Aren't they supposed to be professional, intelligent people? I've even - gasp - known some with "bottom set" names.

Jamilla is a perfectly normal Arabic name and quite common amongst the South Asian community. Which shows how daft it is, not to mention snobbish and potentially racist, to prejudge people on the basis of their given names. It certainly wasn't the norm to do this when I was involved in recruiting.

nanamilly do you think you heard right? it may have been Veronica?

Is that your real name then Jalima?

we took our toddler GD to the park yesterday and were amazed to hear a young calling to their children Brockley and Verucca, we had to move away

Jamilla etc etc. Are being judged and found wanting from the start

Oh no, !!
There is no hope for me - does it count if it has an alternative spelling? - especially as my middle name was a no-no on another thread!!

At least my mother, my DIL and my DGD are amongst teacher's 'top set'
Oh, and my brother could have been Prime Minister

My step DIL called her daughter by the nickname she was calling her "bump" when pregnant! I thought she would call her a "proper" name when she arrived but she didn't and because she and my step son had agreed if it was a girl she chose the name and if a boy he chose he hadn't got any say in the matter!!

teacher you are spot on, and teachers and employers are still judging by name, even if only at first.Any child called Tyler, Chardonnay ( or other spellings) Wayne, Madonna, Breeze,Jamilla etc etc. Are being judged and found wanting from the start.

Varian We are probably of the same generation.

I love my granddaughters names which are quite traditional but when my son and dil announced the first name of the first baby they were expecting we were quite shocked and surprised when they said they'd always liked it as it's quite old fashioned. Given 8 months to get used to it before he was born we had all shortened it and now at 2 years old it really suits him. We weren't told the name of their second baby until he was a day old and were to say the least quite worried as we couldn't think of any way it could be shortened and its such a big name for a small baby. However they have given him a nickname based on it which is quite cute for 7 month old and his big name will be great when he's older.

Love your post of 06:59:04, teacher.

A test we used is "How does it sound yelled up the stairs?" (or in a public street/park). If it can be yelled with impunity (no embarassment anywhere), it'll do .

My dad played with the idea of giving my eldest brother the middle name Bridlington because he thought that, with my brother's first name and surname and QC on the end, it sounded tip top. My mum vetoed that idea but my bro still has a tip top sounding name with letters after it. Not QC though.

The Sunday Telegraph Rich List features more than a handful of your "bottom set" names, Teacher11. As does the political hierarchy of the USA. Take heart, you with GC called Mitt or Condoleeza.

One can change one's name by Deed Poll if one hates it that much.

One can also call oneself and ask other people to call one whatever one likes.

So having a name one dislikes is hardly an insurmountable problem.

My new grandson has an awful name, poor little mite, given him by his 4 1/2 year old brother. He'll hate him when he grows up. It's okay to let your child name a cat or dog but your new baby? I don't think so!

My lovely ma in law did not like my daughters choice of names for either of her children and told her so. This caused a rift which was never healed, so sad.

It would never occur to me to go to the trouble of disliking a grandchild's name. To put it another way, I find it hard to imagine my DD choosing a name for her child that I would dislike.

But then I find the variety of names in the world fascinating.

So far my grandsons have new (to the extended family) first names and then middle names in honour of a grandfather and a great-grandfather respectively. At least, they thought the first names were new but it turned out that there had been someone in the paternal line several gernerations back with the same first and second name as GS2. DD didn't know this when she named him. Happy coincidence.

Pippa000, my mother put the kybosh on 'Edmund'which we had liked from Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Perhaps she did the poor child a favour! Who knows?

My own name was popular for the year in which I was given it and then disappeared completely thereafter. I used to have about two, three or four peers with the same name in every school class I was in ( I went to twelve different schools), a pattern which followed me when I was training to be a teacher. Amusingly, I can guess when people were born if they have this name and it will be 1956 only. My mother cannot tell me where she heard the name or why she gave it to me. Thankfully, we of this name all seem to be boring, respectable and normal and I have seen teachers, librarians, administrators and managers with the same name. I guess that 'Scarlett' also popular around that time would have cast a different fate!

My GC have one English Name and one Welsh, to satisfy each side of the family. Both which I like and suits them. I wanted to call my second child, if a girl, Tabitha, my mothers comment was 'That is a cat's name' luckily he was a boy.

When teaching we teachers observed that children's names sealed their fate. Top set children's names observed the middle class law:- that they were drawn from traditional English sources. These mostly comprised names from the bible, Shakespeare, the Brontes (their own names and that of their characters), the classics, English kings and queens, Scotland or Wales if traditional, Jane Austen and other notable but traditional literary origins. Sometimes there would be a fashion for something like English Victorian names like Lily or Mabel and the boys' names were often traditional but shortened, for expample Sam or Ben. Nevertheless, these were the names that seemed to go along with parental interest and whose owners ended up doing well.

The bottom sets often contained exotic names which matched modern celebrities or passing phases. They had random spellings too.

I am not inventing this, merely passing on an observation made over 34 years of teaching. When one of my own children graduated at a good university doing a solid traditional subject her 150 peers for that subject all had names from the 'middle class rule book'. There were five Jessicas and four with my child's name. I was astonished at how the 'rule' had prevailed despite fashion and, especially, political correctness. My guess is that while much virtue signalling goes on in public, in private nothing has changed and that people really know, as they used to say, 'which end is up'.

A test that used to be made was the 'could he/ she be prime minister with this name?' Margaret, Anthony, Gordon, Edward (or Ed) and David all cut the mustard being dull, solid, dependable and traditional. A name is a signal of intent to the world, seemingly.

I called my own daughter a quite unusual name. My mother said 'you can't lumber a child with a name like that!' Other's tried to be less obvious and said 'oh that's unusual'
Her name is becoming very popular now almost 40 years later!
I'm not keen on two of my grandchildren so names but I've grown used to them and can't imagine them as anything else.
Naming a child is fraught with difficulties and has to be the parents responsibility.if it's awful the kids can then only blame the parents!
(My daughter loves her name by the way!)