The name post

So I've had to answer this question a couple of times already so I figured I might as well write it all down to refer people, now that the hubbub around "SICK BABY!" has been replaced by the more usual "Tell me more about your baby and his bizarrely fusty name!" curiosity.

Incidentally, our baby woke up once in the night to eat and then went back to sleep for another four hours. I am splendidly well-rested. This is about 2-3 times the amount of sleep I got in college, and you know, caring for kids doesn't require quite the mental acuity that term papers and attending classes do.

So, the questions I've been hearing a lot are "Where did you get Rupert?" and then more rarely "What prompted James?"

Rupert is a name that Ephiny noticed one day in movie credits and I recall very clearly exactly in what tone she said, "Hey, Rupert! You know what, I think Rupert is a REALLY GOOD NAME!" (We have conversations like this all the time, since we talk about names the way other people talk about sports.)

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that the movie credits were actually the credits of the Forsyte Saga, the 2002 mini-series... you know, the very same novel and associated adaptations that we got Jolly's name from.

In fact, the actor named Rupert is the lovely and talented Rupert Graves, who was in this context cast as...

Young Jolyon. Um. Yes. But isn't he attractive?

I think at this point I'd begun lobbying for Jolyon as the name of our in-utero eldest child whom we strongly suspected to be a boy, and I said something to the effect of, "Well, we can't have a Jolyon AND a Rupert, now can we? That's like recycling the same naming inspiration."

I also wasn't sure that Rupert felt like the name of my child, although I agreed with Ephiny that I found it to be a fine name. So, we decided to keep the name on the list for a second child... and I decided to take the name Rupert for a bit of a test drive by reading some books about Ruperts and by Ruperts and see how the name felt upon repeated exposure.

One of those books was Riders, by Jilly Cooper.

Here is the image that I would like to show you, which was the cover of the book as I obtained it from inter-library loan:


But if I am ruthlessly honest, this cover is much more representative of contents within:

(Yes, you should absolutely rush out and read it!)

I plowed through Riders at a remarkable pace, made Ephiny read it before the interlibrary loan was due back, and then the two of us romped through its 800-page epic sequels at a remarkable clip hampered only by the rate at which they could be requested by the library. Even more remarkable given that we were both working and caring for a toddler. But who needs sleep when you can be following the salacious adventures of Rupert Campbell-Black and his friends?

Needless to say, this worked to make me rethink the name and I decided on very short order that I absolutely felt like our next male child was going to be a Rupert. I should point out though that if you read Riders you might be inclined to view Rupert as the villain, as Ephiny did, and you might not be won over to Team Rupert until Rivals, the first of the many sequels.

So, there you have it. This child definitely was a Rupert from the first moment we knew he was going to be a boy. (And Jolly is definitely NOT a Rupert, so I'm very pleased with how things worked out.) There were only minor wibblings when the News Corp scandal broke, but at that point we'd already purchased the letters to hang over his crib and we decided that the way to prevent Mr Murdoch from being the primary association for the name was to put another Rupert into the lives of people we know.

James is after Ephiny's grandfather. It didn't get decided until the very very end. By that I mean that we were having conversations about deciding between it and the Middle Name Not Taken during labor, though we'd had a short list of family names from Ephiny's side that we'd been discussing as middle name contenders for the entire pregnancy. Again, we had to have SOMETHING to discuss and agonize over, because names are a bit of a hobby in these parts. I'm very pleased that James is a very different style from Rupert, which means that if RJ decides he would like to have a less fusty, British name in the future, he can go by R. James and have a totally normal, on-trend name... just as his big brother could be J. Max if he so desires.

Edited to add: the question of nicknames has been tossed around by everyone from interested grandparents to the anesthesiologist who topped off my epidural after 13 hours. The anaesthesiologist knew a Rupert who went by Rupaldo, which I think we will be skipping. I rather like Rip, a traditional Rupert nickname, but it's going to be an occasional just-by-mummy nickname just like Jolly, because Ephiny doesn't care for it. Rupe leaves both of us unexited and reminds me a bit to much of the Indian currency. Roo (or Ru) is adorable in the baby stages, I think, and Pert might get tossed around periodically during the teenage years when there is sass. Mostly, we think Rupert is a short enough name that we have no trouble using the full thing.