While I was skimming through an old RPG module one day, I found an interesting feminine first name that I didn’t remember seeing before and decided, as I sometimes do, to do a quick search – how uncommon is that name, really? What’s its origin? Its meaning?

In addition to the usual scraps from baby-name websites,¹ I found one real-life example (a college athlete) and a custom-domain Tumblr that – in order to keep it obscure, for reasons that will become clear – I’ll call Nicename.com.²

This Tumblr has one post, from 2013, that I’ll just go ahead and repost here, slightly paraphrased:

Nicename (running into the room): “Dad, the hamster is NOT communist!”

Me: “Well that’s good. If there’s one thing I won’t have in this house, it’s a ommunist hamster. How do you know he isn’t communist?”

Nicename: “Because he’s jumping all around!”

Me: “Do you mean calm?”

Nicename: “Yeah, he’s not calmunist.”

How old was this kid at the time, four or five?

 

I thought nothing of the blog’s brevity at first. Maybe Nicename didn’t say anything else that was that kind of (allegedly) funny. Or maybe someone told him that he was being unnecessarily embarassing as a parent. And let he who has never abandoned a blog cast the first stone.

…wait. That custom domain costs money. And it’s been costing money for eleven years and counting.

I don’t know anything about Dad’s income, budget, or level of financial awareness, so $12 a year might not be an amount he notices, but that isn’t the only possible reason he’s been paying for the domain all this time:

• He likes the “kids say the darndest things” genre of humor enough that his one brief foray into it must be immortalized for all time.

• He likes being an unnecessarily embarassing parent to a girl who’s in, what, her mid teens by now?

• His now ex-wife got control of the domain and is preserving it to spite him, their daughter, or both.

• He wants to deny Nicename the use of the domain name, fearing that she’ll use it to become a pop idol or porn star or something.

• He wants to deny everyone the use of the domain name, keeping her rare name just that little bit rarer and more special.

None of these are really despicable, and a couple seem pretty harmless, but none of them are reasons I’m eager to support. And that’s why I’m not linking to the Tumblr or revealing the first name that sparked all this.

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1. Some sites had no data on this name at all. Their general consensus seemed to be:
   
   Gender: female.
   
   Rarity: extreme.
   
   Origin: maybe Old English? It kinda sounds Old English. Or maybe a modern invention that happens to closely resemble an Old English surname.
   
   Meaning: (shrug) maybe derived from a place name…

2. The actual nicename.com is blank, except for a broken “privacy policy” link and a copyright notice with no name. Maybe someone’s domain squatting.