To call our baby Huckleberry?

[queenmools]

We are really struggling to think of boys' names for our second baby (due in 3 weeks.) We have no idea if it will be a girl or boy. The girl's name is all sorted but we already have one boy and have kind of peaked with naming him. My husband came up with Huckleberry and says he is not joking. I really like it but don't know if I'm brave enough. We are not American and feel it is a very American sounding name so maybe would be out of place. Also would it work for an adult? Would an adult named Huck sound like a complete tosser? I should point out that we live in a very alternative area with lots of unusual names around.

Read all these posts with interest....I was bullied mercilessly because of my unusual name...but then again I was bullied about lots of things,(6ft at twelve, glasses, braces etc etc)....There is no way I would have given my child an unusual name...I chose 3 simple to spell names.

I had a mouse named Huckleberry as a child, it really suited it.

Get your husband a mouse.

I say call your baby whatever the hell you like. Huckleberry's quite cute and is no more off the wall than many of the baby names coming out of my peer group right now. Go for it.

I am American and I can tell you this is not "very American." In a land of (by British standards) crazy names, I have NEVER met anyone named Huckleberry. If you want to go American literary/alternative, use Atticus. Please do not do this to your child.

Marylou makes a good point. Make sure the name is easy-ish to spell. I've known kids with dyslexia who really struggle to spell their own names.

OP I had a maiden name that rhymes with fuck. At secondary school, it suddenly became absolutely hilarious to everyone. Please don't do it. There are unusual names which are fine and then there are ridiculous names.

What about Isambard? An ex-colleague of mine called her son this. I think it's lovely. I believe they call him Sam.

Yep it's a cute baby name.

It's a nice name for a dog.

Is it a respectable name for a grown adult man who might need to be taken seriously? No it is not.

Marmaduke is unspeakable.

Your DH needs to be banned from having ideas

I wasn't bullied per se for my last name, but I did get a lot of nicknames from it. It doesn't even rhyme with something rude... The first three letters can just be elongated into the name of a vegetable. I hated it! My DP has a really straightforward last name, so our son is getting that as a last name, all my anti-patriarchy feelings pushed aside!

I know someone who wanted to call her unborn child Wolf or Thor if it were a boy... fortunately it was a girl. I do get the whole hormonal pregnancy baby name blindness though... I'm taking the piss out of Huckleberry, and we chose really down-to-earth names for our baby boy, but some of the girls' names I thought up were absolutely mad. I look back at the list now and think a) 'what an earth was I thinking?!' and at the same time b) 'but Snow is a pretty name for a little girl born in winter!'

Lady Lucinda Lambton called her son Huckleberry - only afterwards did she discover she was related to "Mark Twain"!

I have a Huxley - nn Huckleberry sometimes. He is AWESOME! At nearly 10 he is a bit meh about having an unusual name because Everyone says "wow- cool name!" when they meet him. But he stands out for other reasons too, so if he was called Bob he'd be a bit exceptional too.

I am the only person who is allowed to call him Huckleberry Pie.

I really like it and Huck is fine as an adult name. I like Marmaduke much more, though. And where I live, it seems perfectly reasonable to me, surrounded as I am by Inigos and Ottilies :)

I can only imagine the type of schools that some people here must have attended, but I cannot recall anybody ever getting bullied for their names in my childhood.

DH went to school with a Boudicca and a Caractacus!

Huckleberry reminds me of the Waltons for some reason. Must be the country bumpkin outfits!
P.S. please don't do it, but Berry/Berri would be ok, or as a PP said, Rowan is gender neutral too.

Hormones do strange things towards the end of pregnancy. I wanted to call dd3 Bambi.
Perhaps think of a name that both an extroverted and an introverted child would like. Very hard to pull off an alternative name when you are introverted and just want to be called Kate.

What about Mowgli?

[https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Huckleberry+pie&espv=2&biw=1366&bih=667&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=BTVCVKDTMMrg7QaCkoBg&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAQ#facrc=&imgdii=&imgrc=Be8OXkSM2gCUPM%253A%3BXZDWFcaITTkBNM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fimg3.wikia.nocookie.net%252F__cb20131106233423%252Fstrawberryshortcakeberrybitty%252Fimages%252F9%252F94%252FSsbba-character-huckleberry_pie_570x420.jpg%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fstrawberryshortcakeberrybitty.wikia.com%252Fwiki%252FHuckleberry_Pie%3B570%3B420 Huckleberry Pie]]

oops fail.

Huckleberry pie

At first I hated it.

Now I've read the thread again..I quite like it

Call him that but be prepared for the day when he's old enough (after a lifetime of being ridiculed) to give himself a nice name.

I like Henry, nicknamed Huck.

Well it made me smile! I think it's kind of sweet, but would shorten to Huckle not Huck.

I really don't know what your point is any more heart and I don't think you do either. I think you're covering up for your unkind original post by pretending you have an important point to make.

You poured scorn on 'rich' people who can, rather bizarrely according to you, have the audacity to call their children unusual 'posh' names and somehow 'get away with it' as they can do what they want...?

So is it better or worse for 'rich/posh' people to call their kids 'ludicrous' names than for poorer people to call their kids unusual names, could you clarify? And I'm guessing you wouldn't come on here and slag off the name Lateisha (a name you posted above btw) and ridicule the OP about that?

(And I'm actually not trying to be argumentative on this one - I don't know any kids of with any of the names you've quoted. I live in Islington, my daughters have gone to school in Highgate, Euston and Camden over the years. All states schools, children from all different backgrounds. Over the 15 years since my first dd was born I've seen increasingly unusual names but pretty much the same 'unusual' names...an anomaly I know!).

The reality is people are judged on their names. I once had a job on a maternity unit in a low sociodemographic area. There were some great baby names. My favorites were Klo-e and Burberry.

I like Huck but wouldn't use Hucklyberry.

We used abbreviations of old names as names - names that you couldn't get away with without some serious assumptions being made - first it was likely we'd be seen to be taking the piss or daft and second assumptions would be were were very religious and possibly American. The abbreviations have since started climbing the baby names charts.

I do think boys names are hard to find something unusual but not so usual people act daft.

DH has a very common - ( common as in very popular) boys name - he's spent most of his life answer to his surname - he had 6 other boys in his class at school with his name - most work places he's been in have at least one person with the same name and usually more. He wanted something different for his own DC.

Can not say I blame him - eldest ended up with a DC in the school year group not in the same class with same first name. They looked very different and had very different surnames and personalities - yet people managed to cause so much confusion - letters confusion, the DC doing a talk, art work, clothings - was 4 years till other DC move and still we get the occasional issue - even after they'd left people came up to us and asked when we were leaving. Oh and I hated the school insisting on calling DC first name and an initial of surname - I understood why and never complained but it never sounded very nice.

It IS your hormones.

When I was pregnant with DD I really liked the name Glory. I thought it was lovely.
A very good friend mocked me relentlessly until I saw sense.

I am so very grateful.
Please, please let me do that for you now.

Do not give your child this name. If you truly like it, let it be his nickname.
Also, please be aware he may not always live where you live now. He may choose to be a corporate banker. People will smirk at him all day long. Do you want that?