Rural-Urban Migration

I just got back from Atlanta, and I have to say, I admire Urban Meyer. I actually don’t know anything about the man. But what more do you need to know about someone with such a great first name? In fact, I’m thinking about naming our baby Urban. What I like most is how the name speaks of sophistication, high culture, and avant garde creativity. Perhaps we could achieve a similar effect if we went with a name like “Downtown,” but in that case, wouldn't the kid feel too much pressure to be a Hall of Fame center in the NBA, or at the very least, a respectable R&B musician? Come to think of it, maybe names like Urban or Downtown are a little too high-falutin for my humble, East Texas roots. Just so there won’t be any undue pressure on his/her character development, we could always name our first child Rural Sims . . . then, as long as s/he’s literate, we’ll be happy.

But why stop at “Rural”? What really struck me about the name Urban was how bold his parents must have been to pick a name like that for their child. Who needs conventional names like John and Peter when there’s a grab bag of names to choose from in the social sciences. This is why, in addition to Urban and Rural, I’m also considering Industrial Sims, Deviant Sims, Ethnocentric Sims, or my personal favorite, Gesellschaft Sims – all of these are perfectly suitable names for a kid.

There’s one other avenue I haven’t explored yet: maybe the parents of Urban Meyer had no interest in the secular academic route – maybe they opted for something more spiritual . . . as I see it, they easily could’ve named their kid after Pope Urban VIII. (In a previous post, I referred to our child as a future Nobel laureate. But why shoot so low? Why hope for a master of the arts or sciences when you can expect your child to be a master of divine communication?) So I’ve changed my mind, and now I really desperately hope our kid grows up to be Pope one day. With that in mind, I need to start considering names; like the Meyers must have done at one point 40 or 50 years ago, I’ve narrowed it down to a shortlist:

First, there’s obviously Benedict. But Benedict is way, WAY too popular right now (I just saw a book of papal baby names in Barnes and Noble the other day, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s at the top of the list again this year.). So I’m going to have to go much further back to find a unique one. Not to give it away prematurely, but Gelasius (AD 492-496) is currently at the top of the list. I can’t explain why – Gelasius Sims just has such a good ring to it. But there’s also Innocent (AD 401-417) or Boniface (AD 418-422) which are both very popular pope names, used over and over . . . which worries me in itself: maybe they’d be a little too commonplace. I think Simplicius (AD 468-483) is another good one, but I’m pretty sure an aspiring rapper by the same name once approached me in a Target parking lot in Houston and sold me his mixtape. There’s Hyginus (AD 136-140), but I’m afraid a kid by that name would be much too likely to suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. On the the other hand, something tells me OCD is a prime qualification for the papacy. I don’t know – that’s just a hunch. The only other ones on my shortlist are Pius (AD 140 – 155) and Hilarius (AD 460-468), but both of those seem a little too hard to live up to.