ShareThisFrom Rose to Rihanna, Andrew to Atticus, parents often go one of two ways with middle names: plain and simple, or what might generously be called "creative."
"The middle name now is doing a lot of the heavy lifting," said Laura Wattenberg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard" and creator of the fun-to-browse www.babynamewizard.com.
"It's sort of your secret identity -- it's a part of you (that) you don't necessarily want to show to the rest of the world."
Judging by online blogs, folks are putting a lot more effort into finding that perfect name their children will probably hate by the time they're 10.
"I think that people are moving past the idea that middle names are just sort of connective tissue between the first name and the last name," said Pamela Redmond Satran, co-creator of www.nameberry.com, online mecca for the moniker-obsessed, and co-author of several books on the subject.
"Middle names are actually a place where people feel they can be more adventurous than with the first name."
For better or worse, some middle names are subject to scrutiny (Barack Hussein Obama), some are nonexistent (Adolf Hitler, Harry S. Truman -- the initial doesn't stand for anything).
Some people (James Paul McCartney, Nelle Harper Lee) use it in place of a first name. Yet others have many in the middle (Kiefer William Frederick Dempsey George Rufus Sutherland).
Often, the middle name is chosen as a tribute. It's a chance to honor an old friend or perhaps just suck up to rich old Aunt Martha.
And sometimes, an interesting middle name is just a happy accident.
Pittsburgh City Councilman Patrick Dowd and his wife, Leslie Hammond, were living in Berlin in 1997 on a German Academic Exchange Service grant when the first of their four girls was born.
A woman at the local bureau of vital statistics would not accept their choice of Mackenzie as a proper girl's first name.
"She said, 'There's an approved list,' and that wasn't on it," Dowd said. A quick stateside phone call to Dowd's grandmother convinced them to name the baby in Great-Grandma Mary's honor, thus, "Mary Mackenzie Hammond Dowd."
But she goes by Mackenzie.
One of the biggest minefields involves use of a family surname, a tradition favored by, among others, old-school upper classes and Southerners. Satran and her husband chose Leopold as a middle name for their older son, Joe, after a great-grandfather.
"It has a lot of symbolic value, but it might have been a hard (first) name for a modern little boy to live with," she said.
Her younger son, Owen, has Redmond as his middle name.
Bridgit Wolf of Mount Lebanon, Pa., and her ex-husband, Bob Mason, chose for their firstborn Andrew, but passed along Divvens as a middle name: "It was my maternal grandparents' name," she said.
This fact came to light before a national audience in December when Andrew Mason, CEO and co-founder of Groupon, was asked a business question on NBC's "Today."
He responded with a childhood anecdote: "I was embarrassed of this middle name (Divvens). Josh Wilson made fun of me on the baseball field. I started crying and ran after him."
After he finished, program host Matt Lauer laughed and said, "This is answering my question, how?"
"Well, we knew it was an issue then, he came home all mad at us," Wolf said. "And we never heard anything more about it."
Until the "Today" show, of course.
In the case of horror novelist Joe Hill, using a middle name as nom de plume made sense. He's the son of Stephen King, and his middle name is Hillstrom. He shortened it to use as a surname to maintain his literary identity.
At a recent signing of his "Locke & Key" graphic novels at a comic-book shop in West Mifflin, Pa., Hill was approached by a curious fan who wanted to know which writer's name was "real."
"King is his real name and Hill is my real name," he said, smiling. "It just happens to be my middle name."
Those of a certain age can smile while remembering the 1962 "What's in a Middle Name?" episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Little Ritchie wants to know why his middle name is Rosebud.
It's a funny exercise in trying to make everyone happy. ROSEBUD is an acronym for the names of older relatives: Robert Oscar Sam Edward Benjamin Ulysses David.
(Reach Maria Sciullo at msciullo(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
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