Your opinions

[jyl-mac.livejournal.com]

I'm currently in love with the name Archer for a girl. It's always listed for boys but I can't get past it being a feminine name.

What do you think and can anyone string together a good middle name to attach with a 2-syllabal "A" last name?


Please note, obviously I am very pro-unique names.

Comments

[krosp.livejournal.com]

I don't personally like the name (more because I don't like occupation names than because it's a boys' name though) but if you love it for a girl I agree that a feminine middle name is important. It should also be one that you like enough that if she really turns out to be a girly girl or hates Archer, she could go by without you being too upset by that!

I know that most of the time people don't know middle names, but I find that the times that you do give your middle name is on official things where they get your name without having met you, like resumes. Or at least, if she really wanted to stress that she was female, she could always put "Archer Catherine ___" (for example) on whatever she was applying to. With a feminine name middle name it doesn't sound all that masculine at all. When I was doing my honours thesis, I was recruiting from a participant pool of students, and most of them were female... so when I had a male sounding name on my list I was very excited because I wanted as close to an equal amount of males and females as possible. I had one person come up whose name was Ryan Alex ____, and it was a girl. To me that stressed the importance of having something distinguish the gender -- or at least, not something that looks SO much like the opposite gender that you would assume they were... at least giving someone two unisex names (e.g. Taylor Morgan) leaves you guessing....whereas Ryan Alex really sounded like a guy to me.

Sorry to go off on a tangent, but that is my real-life example of the importance of middle names when giving an ambiguously-gendered first name :p