My daughter is called Tibbs Smith Danks. No middle name, no hyphen, no extraneous vowels, three syllables played on a drum.
Baby-naming is a gargantuan task. The name you choose has to pay it forward into a lifetime of passports, job applications, and exclusive guest lists. For the rest of both your lives, you have to be able to say your kid’s name with a completely straight face. You have to shout the name in the park. You have to applaud the name on the potty. You have to tell the name off for outstaying its curfew and drinking cider with older boys.
It’s impossible to hear someone’s name for the first time and not have an expectation (and a tiny twinge of judgement). I had a paper round the year Brooklyn Beckham was born, and remember the announcement taunting me from the front pages of my deliveries. Twenty-odd years on, his name feels almost pedestrian.
In another way, naming a baby is like dressing well: a careful calibration of subtly moving parts. You don’t want to be too soft, too hard, too new-fangled, too ancient; not too floral, not too mechanical, too sweet, nor too bitter. It’s the still just before the thunder, the anticipation of lightning. And above all, a baby’s name has to be memorable. Forgettable is for other peoples’ kids.
It’s the thing about being called Raven Smith: It’s a real party at the front, business at the back kind of name. While Smith grounds everything, I’ve had a lifetime of “Is that your real name?” and “Like the bird?” for Raven. But I’ve grown into it—or perhaps alongside it—without ever outgrowing it. And my middle name’s Antony (no H for no reason), so my initials are RAS, as in Ras Tafari, as in Rastafarian; my mum really knocked meaning out of the park.
There’s some lady in New York who can help name your kid; people apparently go blank on their third. But as an ideas man and bit of a wordmonger (I already regret typing this word), coming up with my baby’s name myself was paramount when the time came.
Roman Smith has been my top-choice baby name since I was 16, and a guy called Roman said to me, “Between the two of us, we could have any guy in this club.” I immediately became deeply enamoured with his pep: Roman was bold, Roman was unapologetic, Roman was hot shit (I never saw him again). Roman, Romulus, Remus were all offspring contenders—but then the money-vultures on Succession put the kibosh on that.
Once the fetus was viable, I—feeling the burn of finding the best name ever—started a shared doc so my husband and I could pool ideas. I still think Dorsia (Danks; alliteration is powerful stuff) is a great modern-ish literary homage, but some Silicon Valley dorks called their restaurant booking app that. Calling a baby Tartt would be fucking excellent—but does it forecast a lifetime of sweet treats or medieval sex work? I loved Bluto, Popeye’s bolshie nemesis, but my husband thought it felt heavy; you have to be built like an XL Bully to pull Bluto off, and that’s a lot to put on an unborn baby. Donatello was my favorite Ninja Turtle, but once you crack the lid on early Renaissance sculptors you’re fucked because the subtext is an unhealthy obsession with the classics.
I can, of course, tell you all these projected, once-upon-a-time names now that Tibbs is here—signed, sealed, delivered (passported). If you tell anyone your prospective baby names before the birth, they will give you their honest opinion, which you think you want, but you actually do not. Some if-we-have-a-second-baby names are staying locked in the vault in my head so I don’t have to know if they sound “heavy” or “like a Ninja Turtle app.”
The earliest stumbling block was that despite so few of my potential names being gendered, they didn’t suit the girl we found out we were expecting. (Some didn’t suit a human, either: Filet is a great name for a cat.) Because she was being born in Mexico City, we considered a few locales—Roma, of course, and Condesa—but she wasn’t Mexican in the traditional sense, in the same way she doesn’t have a mother in the traditional sense (that is a whole other column). I loved Thibault for her (before she was a her), but she’s as French as she is Mexican, and not Juliet’s short-tempered first cousin in a Shakespeare play. I also didn’t want to have to put on a French accent to pronounce my daughter’s name correctly; Thibault’s vowels are almost too gentle for a South Londoner. Also, names that are pronounced differently than they are spelt are annoying (this saw Pterodactyl Smith Danks stricken off, too).
Despite sounding like a derivative of Thibault, Tibbs was an early frontrunner. My husband said it felt too French, but that’s only because I’d said “Thibault” in a Gérard Depardieu accent so many times around him. Historically, Tibbs is an old English surname (sure), but its most iconic usage is in the Oscar-winning 1967 drama In the Heat of the Night, for Sidney Poitier’s character, Virgil Tibbs. To cut a long and intricate story very short, Virgil Tibbs is a Black police detective in Mississippi, battling racism whilst looking suave as fuck. My Tibbs doesn’t have to do either, but both would be lovely.
Like anyone with a bun in the oven, I’ve never overthought anything as much in my life. But Tibbs is all the good things I want in a name: dancing between the extremes I’m glad to avoid, rare but not batshit kamikaze. I know it’s a bit much to go on about nailing her name—but if I didn’t feel so relieved, well, I’d simply have failed the gargantuan task.