View Message

You've come to the wrong board for asking this, my friend. ;) This place is quite a lost colony of people who detest surnames on girls.

---

I think that Delaney sounds feminine enough to work on a girl, but it doesn't have any real femininity to it. Laney isn't pretty, nor is Delaney, in any long-sighted sense; it's simply in the current mode, and the current mode values a very different sort of attractive quality than I do.

---

I have a weakness for the name Lain, though (not Laine or Lane or Layne or anything else of the sort), which can be blamed on the anime, I suppose. I think that Della's a fun little name, too, with a much truer spirit than Delaney. Where Delaney sounds like a plastic cowgirl doll in cardboard packaging, Della sounds like a girl with dusty legs and a muddy hem, if you know what I mean. Delaney sounds prepackaged to me, like a one-size-fits-all cowpoke name for people who won't even see wild animals (or even farm animals) regularly but want to think they might.

---

Instead of Delaney, I'd suggest Adele, Adela, Della, Nell, Eleanor, Ellen, Cassia, Elaine, Delia, Daisy, Billie, May, Detta, or Jane. I'm not sure that any of those would catch your fancy, but I find they all have the integrity that Delaney lacks in my eyes.

---

Array

---

---

"What are these parents thinking?...Let's name her Madison--she'll live in her own world: 16 square miles surrounded by reality." -- Susan Lampert Smith