Odd applicable names

[zdashamber]

So, awhile back while out at a club, I was talking with some of my friends about odd names...

Mariya: "Oh, wait, Madeline can give an independent opinion-- Madeline! What do you think about the name 'Astrid'?"
Me: "...Um..."
Jeff: "Let me give you a hint-- it starts with the word 'ass'."

Apparently our friend Damian's girlfriend is bound and determined that their first daughter will be named Astrid.

The strangest thing I'm leaning towards actually using on a kid is "Joris". Nice simple Dutch/Frisian guy's name... It's much harder to come up with good guy's names, and Joris is uncommon and heritage-full.

What's the strangest name you guys are actually leaning towards using on a kid, should you aquire a new one?

Comments

[follybard.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately for the purposes of this exercise, any "new" kids in my household are likely to show up with names already attached. :) But as I recall, the most interesting names I could get the spouse to declare reasonable were "Gabriel" and "Miriam" -- which, y'know, are pretty mundane.

I mentioned "Alaric" as a possibility to my very-pregnant best friend when she said they were considering "Alec". I went to elementary school with an Alaric and always thought it was a cool name. I wasn't sophisticated enough at the time to wonder whether his parents were gamers.... :)

I am a big fan of generating names by pulling Scrabble tiles out of a bag, though. That's how I got former character names "Cydrian" and "Lyrrin", both of which I still really like....

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Hee. To me, both Gabriel and Miriam bring back happy gaming memories. Gabriel was about the best portrayal of a character I've ever seen... 100% pure-quill Amberite, session after session. And Miriam was a daughter of Caine (biblical name), who had a lovely tragedy built around her... In the distant past of an Amber split by civil war, she'd been the lover of a PC on the other side, who had accidentally killed her, mistaking her for Deirdre.

Anyway, good names, both. And I like Cydrian and Lyrrin, too. What sorts of characters were they?

[follybard.livejournal.com]

They were both from my grad school days, when most -- well, OK, all -- of our campaigns were of the old-school-D&D-fantasy style. Cydrian was a young fighter who had taken her dead brother's identity to go to fighting school as a wee lass but got booted out when she hit puberty and couldn't pass as a boy anymore. My favorite moment with her was a bar brawl in which she squared off against a guy about her own age who was trying to run off with some artifact our party had been sent to retrieve. Cydrian kicked him so hard she broke his arm. "Ow! What'd you do that for?" the kid asked. "Stop running and I'll stop kicking you!" Cydrian replied. In some ways she was a precursor of my current ftf Amber character Genevieve, except Eve has a *much* worse attitude. :)

Lyrrin was less well-developed because I only got to play her for a couple of sessions -- that campaign was gearing up right before I moved to CA. She was a middle-aged bard with an obscenely high charisma score, IIRC. In the last session I played with her, the party got attacked by... I can't remember if it was were-somethings or vampire-somethings. The GM emailed me months later to tell me he'd brought her back as an NPC because he just couldn't resist the idea of throwing the party up against a cute, friendly were-rat (or whatever it was she'd turned into)....

[cochese.livejournal.com]

Our current plans dub a future daughter as "Random Thelma Z." and a future son as "Osric Ewald Z." In the off chance we have a second son, we're considering "Fenris Percival Blakeny Z."

You had to ask, didn't you?

[zdashamber.livejournal.com]

Yep. You got me beat. By a mile. I was planning to leave the really weird stuff for middle names. Like "Aldebaran."

Just be sure you consider how the names shorten... ;)

[cochese.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Randy can be a bit tough, but I figure any name can be mocked. I was called Germy by more people than I care to think about.

[amberdiceless.livejournal.com]

I have long since determined that if I am ever blessed with a son, he will be named Robinton, after Anne McCaffrey's Masterharper. This because I like the character and the name, it's in the same weird-but-not-too-weird category as Laurana (as we named our daughter,) and my father and brother were both named Robert.