There are traditional American names as well.. But thats so boring if we all had the same few names. Oh the laughs caused by things lost in translation..

Our son was called Finlay, which was ‘Fair haired warrior’ in Scots Gaelic (though his baby blond hair in now red), is a County Tipperary surname, where we lived, (so he had a thrill of seeing Finlay Paints, Finlay Cars, Hotels etc), also it was from my childhood, a TV period drama, ‘Doctor Finlay’s casebook’. Now at 23, his friends call him Fin.

Our daughter is called Illaun, which is Irish for island, sounds nice and looks cool. When she went to school at 5 years she told all she was called Fuchsia her second name, which is a beautiful red flowered small bush (it was beside my wife’s bed when she woke post birth). Thing was she didn’t tell us of the change so, when we met the teacher, we thought it was the wrong child she was talking about! Now she is happy at 21, I still call her Illaun and her cool friends call her Phuch.

The life effect a name can have is endless, (hence ‘A Boy Names Sue” Jonny Cash). My mother was going to call me by my saint’s day apparently ‘St. Erasmus’. Thank good she didn’t but perhaps by this stage I would be a Nobel Prize winner or perhaps in an institution!

So so many many people cannot stand their names and change them when they leave home. Off the nine children in my mother’s family, five of them changed their names perhaps this is why my mother was cautious.

http://www.snopes.com/racial/language/names.asp

OR AT LEAST GOOGLE THE NAMES + URBAN LEGEND. THEY’VE BEEN URBAN LEGENDS FOR 20 YEARS AND THEY HAVE NEVER SHOWN UP ON A CENSUS. THIS IS HOW IT HAPPENS:

Someone, somewhere, makes this up. That person — we’ll call them person A — is untrustworthy, but another person — person B — is a bit gullible and believes them anyway. So they repeat it. Person C isn’t as gullible, but doesn’t realize how gullible person A is, and besides, the story is JUST TOO GOOD.

Gradually, this gets more complicated so that by the time Person F hears it, it’s too many steps to remember, so he’ll shorten it to “This happened to person E.” After all, Person E told him about it. It is human nature to decrease our number of levels of separation from an event. Eventually, it gets to someone nice and trustworthy, and they aren’t intentionally lying to you. They just decreased the number of levels of separation. They say it happens to someone they knew, when in truth, they’d been told it happened to a friend of a friend, and even THAT friend of a friend had undergone the same process.

So, regardless of whether that person is trustworthy in most matters or not, be aware that repeating this kind of racist trash makes you — and her — look kind of bad.