Friday, March 25, 2011

Namesake*




I've had a lot of people asking about where we came up with the name Evey Emaline, so I'm explaining the many origins that combined to give our little girl her name.

If you know me very well, you know that my chosen art form is motion pictures. I love the way movies take so many aspects of art (theatre, photography and cinematography, costume design, writing, etc) and combines them to make this wonderful bit of entertainment that takes you to a different world for two hours. Evey's name is mostly from a plethera of movies that have impacted Christopher and myself in some way.

Her second name, Emaline, is actaully from a song that Christopher and I have loved since we first started dating. Eight years ago, Christopher said "we should name our daughter after this song" and now we are! Who knew that the crazy plans of two kids in love would ever come to completion?!? Here's the song that inspired us.




Her first name wasn't quite so direct. If you take another look at the ultrasound picture from our "Seven Weeks Today" post on December 19th, that's where the idea for her name started. That was the first time we got to see our little fetus and she reminded us of the adorable little "EVE" robot from Disney's Wall-E. Everyone else said "Oh! It looks like a grain of rice!" But Christopher and I weren't convinced. From that moment, our baby was nicknamed Eve-a (based on Wall-E's pronunciation, of course).



When we were discussing names for a girl, I kept coming back to Eve. I guess I'd called the baby that so much, it just made sense to keep on calling her that if she was indeed a she. But I wasn't a fan of Eva because it's such a latino name and we have no latino background and I wasn't a fan of plain old Eve because it's much more common. We loved the movie "V for Vendetta" and Natalie Portman's character, Evey Hammond, was so well written. We decided that "Evey" was uncommon enough to support our character, and we liked the different spelling as well.

We got on babynames.com to find out the meaning of both names when we decided that it may be in the running - and this is what really gave made it our #1 choice.

We had to search by the name Eve, but it's origin is Hebrew and it means "life". Emaline was listed under Emmeline or Emmaline, but it has an English origin and means "work". So her name essentially means "life work" which fits her to a T. We tried for so long to get pregnant and expanding our family has been our number one priority that she really is our life's work. And now that she's really coming, our "life work" will continue forever.

Of course my brain references everything to pop culture, and as soon as I read the meaning I thought about one of my favorite children's books, Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White. The spider, Charlotte, lays her egg sack - her "magnum opus" - her "life's work", if you will. I absolutely LOVED that connection, and one day Evey and I will read that book together and I'll tell her about how her name came to be.


 

1 comment:

  1. Very very cool. I was wondering how you guys came up with such an unusual name.

    ReplyDelete