Baby names - the last bastion of acceptable classism on here

[Cuppasoupmonster]

I see so many threads on here picking at things which are working class - tattoos, certain clothes, council housing etc - and posters generally respond in fury, accusing the OP of snobbery/classism.

So why is it so okay on here to call a baby name ‘chavvy’ or ‘something you can imagine being screamed in ASDA’?

Personally I either like the sound of a name or I don’t, I don’t obsess over the class angle.

I dunno, as a feminist I'd love a butcher called Ophelia!

I'm from the Southern US so in the cookware department, it would be having a cast iron frying pan that belonged to your great-grandmother. That would be an upper middle class indicator. But only if you actually use it.

@RoseAndRose , working class doesn’t mean the same as ‘chavvy’ though. Not to me, anyway.

The last bastion? I can only assume you are new here.

Also there can be a bit of snobbery around names here in the deep South. My grandmother had a friend who hated "trendy" names, some of which had been given to her grandchildren. She used to say that no one had any business naming their children anything that Queen Victoria would not have considered for her children, with the possible exception of Leopold. 😊

Ah, this is just making me think of the episode of West Wing where CJ (one assumes jokingly) refers to Leo as Leopold.

I think cast iron inherited cookware is probably a middle class indicator everywhere.

Are they really bizarrely spelt, or was it just impossible to read their handwriting?

I actually think it’s a bad idea calling children a name that hasn’t been in constant use for the last 500 years. I’m firmly on the side of the poor kids who get landed with a trendy name that belongs to a particular era. I have a very ordinary first name and a very extraordinary middle name and got the piss taken endlessly at school.

I think it's very useful to get anonymous opinions on here, and names are no exception. No-one is going to tell you IRL if the name you're considering might not really give the impression you intended, sounds harsh or twee to most people, is slang for penis, seems wildly out of context or is used as an insult.

There is a snobbery about names on here. I was watching Brassic today and the little boy in it is called Tyler. I wouldn't choose it as a name because I don't like how it sounds, but to some contributors here Tyler might feel like it's a chavvy name just because in their circles it's deemed too working class. Now for me, some names like Oliver, Sebastian and Atticus sound horrible to my ears but I don't assume these names to a particular group of people, they just sound like awful names. I like names that sound nice and go with the surname, regardless of what silly, snobby, classist association it might have.

So true. The average Momsnet user is hilariously classist, while pretending very hard not to be.

You can usually tell the difference between posters who genuinely want a reality check about how their chosen name is going to be perceived in society, and posters who've heard/invented what they think is the prettiest most unique and inspired name ever, and just want everyone to tell them so.

Kind and helpful posters will answer accordingly.

Using the term chavy (which stands for council house and violent) is classist, snobbish and abusive. Nobody as a child, dreams of being malnourished and undereducated, and yet it happens systemically.

Lighten up. That is all.

There's a certain irony in rejecting a name YOU LIKE because you appear to have the same taste as people you look down on. Maybe not such a gulf in taste between the 'chavs' and the chav nots after all.

I wonder if when we say “class “ we mean “culture”. Culture as that in which you were brought up, or currently inhabit or conversely would like to inhabit?

The truth is that in a school setting there are certain names that a teacher will see and know the kid’s going to be a nightmare.