Tag Archives: Baby Name Ponderings

Happy Second Birthday, Waltzing More Than Matilda!

13 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by in Blog News

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2nd-birthdayMy blog turns two years old today. I have to admit, I didn’t think very deeply about what I was doing when I started the blog, and didn’t know any more about blogging than what I’d read in a few articles with titles like Any Idiot Can Blog, or Get Blogging, Stupid! I had finished one part of my life and hadn’t started on the next bit, so a blog seemed like a good idea at the time.

When my account came up for renewal at the end of the first twelve months, I didn’t think twice about it. Of course I had to continue the blog; I’d only been doing it for a year, and felt I had barely started. When I received my second renewal notice at the end of last year, for the first time I actually sat down and asked myself if I wanted to keep going. I pondered deeply for over a month, and some days I seriously considered cancelling my account.

At last I decided that the blog was still growing, and I still had a lot to learn, so for the first time I made a conscious choice to continue Waltzing More Than Matilda. It’s taken me two years, but I have finally begun to think about what I’m doing. It will be interesting to see if this makes any difference!

Thank You, Thank You, to You and You and You

No blogger is an island, and many thanks go to these people for their help and support.

  • To Abby at Appellation Mountain, who for another year has sent me more views than any other blog. Abby’s generosity to others is inspiring, and it’s wonderful to see her go from strength to strength.
  • To Linda at Nameberry for giving me the opportunity to contribute my article, Aussie Names – Big there, not here. Thanks also to Angie at Upswing Baby Names, who was kind enough to provide an American perspective on the names I selected.
  • To Kate at Matilda magazine for inviting me to write an article on The Best Baby Name Blogs. Matilda magazine has been a very exciting innovation in the world of baby names.
  • To Michelle Horton from parenting website Babble for including Waltzing More Than Matilda in her article 20 Favorite Blogs for Baby Names. It came as a genuine, but very welcome, surprise to be mentioned alongside such great name blogs.
  • To Cristina at Once Upon a Time Baby Names for interviewing me about my name. Cristina has recently given her blog a complete reboot, and it looks amazing.
  • To Ebony at Babynameobsessed for being my most loyal commenter, and also reblogging several of my blog entries. Ebony is another Aussie name blogger.
  • To Lou at Mer de Noms for reblogging Boys Names of Australian Aboriginal Origin. Even after a big lifestyle change, Lou’s blog is still going strong.
  • To Brooke at Baby Name Ponderings for turning the 2012 Victorian name data into a fantastic spreadsheet. Brooke is another Australian name blogger, with very creative name ideas.
  • To my 140-odd subscribers, and my 50-odd Twitter followers, and to everyone who reads and comments and sends nice e-mails, and just all round makes blogging worth it!

Nerdy Number-Crunching

  • I have almost half a million views. The country which sent me the most views was Australia, which is good – it would be embarrassing to have a blog on Australian baby names that Australians didn’t read!
  • The most views I ever got were on June 21, when thousands of people suddenly all wanted to read about Jude Bolton’s daughter Siarra at the same time for some reason. As a result, this article was my most popular for the year.
  • The article which has gained the most comments is Girls Names of Australian Aboriginal Origin.
  • The most common search term was waltzing more than matilda, so I guess by now people do know about the blog.
  • The name most often searched for was Ruby, which reflects this name’s high popularity.
  • By posting this, I will have brought my number of posts up to 764. I have 23 categories and 618 tags. The most popular category was Name Themes and Lists.
  • There are 196 featured boys names, 192 featured girls names, and 119 featured unisex names, making over 500 names in total. About a hundred additions to the name database were made based on web searches people made to the blog, looking for baby names as familiar as Rose or Archer, and as unexpected as Australia or Zephyr.
  • The photo which was clicked on the most was the christening of Lauren Newton’s baby daughter Lola, which showed the entire Newton family together.
  • The most popular newspaper article linked to was the one announcing the birth of Addison, the son of ABC presenter Virginia Trioli.
  • The most popular website link was to ABC presenter Leigh Sales’ blog, Well Redhead, at The Punch.
  • The most popular document accessed was Australian Celebrity Baby Names 2011.
  • The most popular YouTube video was this one – basically my version of Rickrolling!
  • The blog on my Blog Roll most often clicked is Upswing Baby Names. Angie has a very professional-looking and practical name blog, and I’m glad to see it gaining such well-deserved interest.

Birthday Present

My present to Waltzing More Than Matilda is her own Facebook page. There are two main reasons I got one: (1) I promised myself I would once I got over 100 subscribers and (2) despite having a Twitter account, I get more views via Facebook than Twitter, so it makes sense. It seems much more complicated and scary than Twitter, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it in time.

Many happy returns, Waltzing More Than Matilda, and here’s to another year blogging together!

Famous Name: Gale

08 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Famous Names

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On August 6 the Curiosity rover, which had been launched by NASA at the end of November last year, successfully landed on the planet Mars. As with the 1969 moon landing, Australian scientists played a crucial role in this international endevour, and NASA administrator Charlie Balden made special mention of the Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex at Tidbinbilla, which is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network. Tidbinbilla was the only space station which was facing Mars for the descent, making it uniquely positioned to transit data from Mars to the Earth.

Curiosity landed on the Gale crater, which is believed to be more than 3 billion years old. The main goal of the mission is to determine whether life could ever have existed on Mars, and it is thought by some scientists that the Gale crater could have contained water at some point. If they are correct, this would make life on Mars a real possibility.

The Gale crater is named after Walter Frederick Gale, an early twentieth century amateur astronomer from Sydney. A banker by profession, Walter Gale made several important astronomical observations, including discovering seven comets. He also examined the surface of Mars, and was a keen supporter of the idea that the planet could contain life.

The surname Gale can be from an Old English nickname for someone who was cheerful, merry or fun-loving by nature. The Normans had a male personal name Geil, meaning the same thing, and that can be another source of the name. Another possibility is that is from the Norman-French word for “gaol”, perhaps denoting someone who worked as a gaoler, or even lived near a gaol. The surname Gale is mostly found in the southern coastal areas of England, but it is also commonly found in Yorkshire, leading to the possibility that there it may be from the Norse word geil, meaning “deep ravine”.

As a vocabulary word, gale has more meanings than you may suspect. It is an old dialect word meaning “to sing”, with connotations of “charm, enchant”, but also referring to birdsong. Gale Day is an old legal term, meaning the day that a tenant’s rent was due to be paid. Sweet gale is another name for the bog myrtle (Myrica gale); a shrub which typically grows in peat bogs. Its sweet scent has seen it used to flavour beer, and to make perfumes, and it’s one of the plants traditionally used in Royal wedding bouquets.

Of course, when we hear the word gale, we most likely think of a strong wind, especially those which feature in storms. It may also remind us of the phrase gales of laughter, which seems to tie in pretty neatly with its original meaning of “cheerful, merry”.

Gale was originally a male name, and taken directly from the surname. It isn’t found as a female name on the US charts until the 1930s – not surprisingly, this correlates with the rise in popularity of the female Gail, used as a short form of Abigail (Gail was also used for boys as a variant of Gale). In the US, despite the popularity of Gail as a girl’s name, male and female Gales existed together until the name disappeared from the charts for both sexes around the same time – 1969 for boys, and 1970 for girls.

In Australia, Gail was a popular girl’s name which peaked in the 1950s at #26, and I suspect for people born around that era, and perhaps a decade or so later, Gale would sound feminine to their ears. However, Gail hasn’t been on the charts since the 1990s, and Abby is the popular short form of Abigail today. If you look on the current Top 100 for the name that sounds most like Gale, it’s a male one – Gabriel.

Gale is an interesting name that by meanings, associations and sound, manages to present itself as both masculine and feminine, depending on how you think of it. I do like the idea of using it as a boy’s name, because English names are lacking male forms which have connotations of joy and happiness, compared to the numbers of female ones. Perhaps also because the Gale Crater is on the planet Mars, a name associated with masculinity for thousands of years.

However, this name is up for grabs by both genders, and does honour a great Australian star-gazer. If you can only think of this as meaning “a strong wind”, it would be on trend as one of the one-syllable nature name, which go so well in the middle position.

UPDATE: Blue Juniper from Baby Name Ponderings has reminded me that of course, Gale Hawthorne is one of the main characters in The Hunger Games trilogy. The best friend and hunting partner of protagonist Katniss Everdeen, Gale is played by Australian actor Liam Hemsworth in the film version. (Liam is the younger brother of Chris Hemsworth).

As Blue Juniper points out, this gives a current-day Gale much more of a masculine edge.