From the outset, my wife and I knew this was going to happen, but every so often someone takes something innocent to an extreme.
My daughter’s name is Hillary.
She is Hillary because it’s easy to say and spell, and it’s both common and uncommon. Those were the criteria for labeling our children: easily recognized and understood, and (and maybe most importantly), it’s not a top 500 name.
Not that it should be anyone’s business, but she was not named after Hillary Clinton. One thing my wife and I didn’t want to do was burden our daughter with a legacy. Famed quarterback Peyton Manning has untold hundreds (if not thousands) of children honoring him, which I’ve always thought was unfair to them.
(“Your namesake won a Super Bowl, and you can’t even clean up your room!”)
Plus, I would never want to slap anything on a child while the person is alive. Imagine any proud African-American families who named their son after Bill Cosby in the 1980s. Whoops on you; your kid was modeled after a rapist.
Every so often someone will ask if my daughter was named after the former First Lady, and I will laugh and intone, “I say thee, nay.” 99% of the time people accept that at face value. But every so often someone comes along with too loose a screw in their head, and they are not fun to deal with. The worst case happened while I was performing in a teeny-tiny town in Iowa…