An App to Help You Choose a Name (or Spend Hours Analyzing the Possibilities)
By KJ DELL'ANTONIA
I am all finished having babies — but if I did have another baby, it might just be so I could have the fun of naming it. I love names (what writer doesn’t?). I loved naming my children (even though, in retrospect, one of those names was more popular than I had hoped). I like reading about names. And if I had had this app when I was pregnant, I’d have been sunk.

For 99 cents, you can download Nametrix, which allows you to scroll through thousands of names to determine what “destiny” each offers your child — or at least, what life held, statistically speaking, for the nameholders who have come before. What’s the No. 1 profession for girls named Daisy? “Presenter,” followed by actor, journalist and singer, Nametrix says. The name “peaked” in 1910, and Daisies are most likely to be Democrats. Wallace, on the other hand, is the name for Republican car salesmen.

Thanks to the app, I now know that I’m raising a gangster, a model, a screenwriter and a child with a name so relatively unusual (although recently popular) that sadly, no career advice is available.

This strikes me as a huge potential time-sink for new parents — and you can share your choices by e-mail.

Maybe Nametrix will help keep you from making any of the mistakes that the ScaryMommy blogger Samantha laments in “Don’t Be That Guy: Baby Name Don’ts.” Who is “that guy”? The one who names his kid S’mantha. Names are forever, she points out, and “the parent makes the call, but the kid lives with it.”

In our culture, the grandparents are given the option to provide the names. . .but you don't have to use 'em!
My children's names were provided by MY MOM. . .AND BY GOD SHE MADE SURE I USE THEM! No need for 'NAMETRIX'!

Good to know