Banter has always been a regular part of the DH newsroom, at least over my 22 years here, and Saturday’s included a lively exchange on the topic of names that began when reporter AnneMarie Knepper made a comment about the name Katelyn.

Basically what AnneMarie said is that to her, Katelyn seemed like a great name for a child but that it sounded funny on someone, say,  age 35.

I’d never really thought about it –  maybe because I’ve never run across a grown-up Katelyn — but it struck me that she was right; it does sound like a kid’s name.

“Sort of like how Ethyl seems like an 80-year-old’s name and that it would sound really odd on a baby,” I said. (Curiously, a couple days later, a friend happened to remark to me that someone she knew had recently named a baby Alice, another very geriatric-sounding moniker; or maybe the parents were just enamored of the Bradys’ housekeeper, or of the dark-haired waitress at Mel’s Diner, or the eatery of which Arlo Guthrie sang.)

Copyeditor Kate Schell then chipped in that she stopped going by Katelyn (or however she spelled it; there are many variations, it seems) when she was about 16.

From there, Kate, AnneMarie and our other copyeditor, Joy Pariante, embarked on a variety of name-related comments and anecdotes; I can’t remember all the details or the order in which they came up, but I recall hearing:

– That some people, particularly little kids, over the years have had trouble grasping and pronouncing AnneMarie’s name.

– That the names Star and Misty were suitable mainly for animals or strippers. I remarked that we used to have both a horse and a rabbit named Star. Misty to me mainly conjures up images of volleyball star Misty May-Treanor, though it also make me think of the Clint Eastwood movie, “Play Misty for Me.”

– That AnneMarie’s mother thought the name Amber was a stripper’s name.

– That someone, can’t recall who, thought the name Autumn Rose — this one was brought up by Joy — sounded either like a stripper or a variety of wine. I said I could see both of those things, and that it also just sounded like a hippie name (seasonal names just tend to, to me anyway).

Being in the newspaper business, names are kind of a central part of the product — it’s hard to write much of a story without throwing in a few of them — and thus I have dealt with many, many names since cranking out my first story, for the weekly Milwaukie Review, in 1982. (I wrote about high school and community sports at the sub-poverty rate of 25 cents per column inch, incidentally).

It didn’t take all that long for me to develop a few fairly strong opinions on how parents go about attaching names to their offspring:

– With very few exceptions, I don’t like made-up names. There are plenty of solid, legitimate names out there; pick one of them. If you want to indulge your creativity, take up oil painting.

– When you choose one of those time-honored names, go with the conventional spelling, please. Meaning if your kid’s full name is Robert, a suitable nickname for that is Rob, not Robb.

– If you must make up a name — if you just have to call your little girl Sparklia because her eyes are so bright — at least spell it such a way that someone has a fighting chance of getting it correct. That is, stay away from Sparchlyae.

– When a family has multiple kids and they all have names that start with the same letter, that’s not so much cute as kind of ridiculous.

– Finally, if you have twins and don’t want your local newspaper to mix them up when they make all-league, reach the rank of Eagle Scout, etc., maybe give them names that are at least sort of different.

When I worked at the Springfield News in the late 1980s, Thurston High had twin brothers, both accomplished athletes, whose first names were Lane and Lance. Their mother actually called the paper once to complain that we occasionally said Lance when it was supposed to be Lane, or vice-versa.

I’m sorry we ever made a mistake, but maybe she could have foreseen a bit of confusion when she assigned them names only one letter off from each other?