Some names encountered recently.

[cremepuff.livejournal.com]

A college acquaintance is expecting a baby girl:

Alyssa Kate


Sibset encountered at work tonight:

Liam and Ainsley


Current student at my former high school:

Easlyn

Comments

[thellamaqueen.livejournal.com]

Alyssa seems to dated to me... it screams "EIGHTIES BABY" in my mind... but my husband's cousin's girlfriend recently had a baby and they named her Alyssa, too. hmm.

[pegasus2o5.livejournal.com]

I love Alyssa. I probably love the look of it more than the sound, but both are fine. Kate I have mixed feelings about. Nicknames-as-full-names tend to irk me a bit. And they seem especially odd as middle names. What next, Jacob Tommy? But I do like Kate. So overall I like the name.

I love Liam. Hate Ainsley. It's so awkward to say and not at all pretty.

Easlyn? What the heck?

[thellamaqueen.livejournal.com]

I totally see what you're getting at with the 'nicknames as full names' thing, but at the same time I think that there are certain nicknames that lend themselves to working as full names, and other nicknames that don't. To use your example of Tommy, I think that Tom could be a stand-alone name, but Tommy doesn't work for me. Similarly, there are a lot of people named Katie, where Katie is their given name and not a nickname, even though Katie started out as a nickname for Katherine (just like Kate).

[pegasus2o5.livejournal.com]

There are lots of names I would agree stand on their own just fine. Jake does okay on its own, Max has long since stopped needing to be Maximilian, Maximus or Maxwell. And as a first name I think Kate would be okay, but for some reason it bothers me in the middle slot. I think it's because using a nickname-form in the middle totally negates the purpose of making it a nickname form. Kate arose from Katherine as a way to make the name more user-friendly (well, and to tell her apart from all the other Katherines). What's the point of a user-friendly name that's not *used*? The middle name is the place for the family name you don't like enough to *really* use, the guilty-pleasure name you're not crazy enough to *really* use, or even the filler name because there has to be something there but it's not the name you would ever *really* use. So to me it seems bizarre to put a name there that was specifically designed to be easier to *really* use.

But my guess is they wanted a one-syllable middle name and they liked Kate and there it is, and they're happy with it and it's not going to traumatize the kid, so my opinion is cheerfully irrelevant. :)