Enough people have inquired about why we chose these particular names that it seems helpful to make a post about it. We’ve also had a number of creative guesses about Petra and Rosalind; I almost want to do a poll about that, but I’ll stick to the point.
The Naming Process:
We’re pretty systematic people, so we started off by each coming up with a list of about 20 names that we liked. We were fortunate to be aided in this mission by an excellent book, the Baby Name Wizard. It was written by Matt’s manager’s wife, and the associated website has lots of fantastic vizualizations of names that may look familiar to those of you who have seen the work of Matt’s group on Many Eyes.
Once we each had a list, we compared them. There was a single name that appeared on both lists, but it wasn’t really a top choice for either of us. Other than that, it was clear that we had radically different taste in girls’ names …
… but we pressed forward. We each picked about 5 names from the other person’s list that we could live with liked best, ending up with a list of 11 names.
Petra:
Over the next few months, we each mulled over those names and discussed the ones we liked better. We finally settled on Petra. It had originally been on Alison’s list, because it (although ending in “a”) was not terribly over-feminine, had a strong meaning (”rock”), and was uncommon without sounding weird.
Matt likes it because (a) it is the female form of his dad’s name, (b) he loves the ancient city in Jordan, and (c) it is the name of one of the main female characters in Ender’s Game, a favorite sci-fi novel. Actually, this is one of Alison’s favorite books, too, but she’d forgotten about the name.
Rosalind:
Originally we were going to give her one of our last names as a middle name and the other as the last name. So we didn’t need to come up with a middle name. Only a few days before she showed up (mind you, she was 14 days early), we talked over the last names again and decided on hyphenation. Then we needed a middle name, so we went back to the original lists of names. Rosalind was one of Matt’s picks that had ended up on the “short” list of 11.
The main reason for choosing this name is because of its Shakespearean connection. As many of you know, Matt and Alison met in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s High school Shakespeare course. Both of us read and performed in many Shakespeare plays in our younger days. Rosalind, from As You Like It, is one of Shakespeare’s many great, strong, female characters. (We actually went through a bunch of the plays looking at names, but a lot of them are … less palatable). It is also the name of the woman scientist who played a major role in the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure (and indeed should have been listed as a coauthor on the seminal paper by Watson and Crick), only to have her role downplayed and recognition thwarted by Watson.
so … Petra doesn’t have too much to live up to, does she?
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