There are clearer criteria for naming dogs than there are for naming people. Illustration by Oliver Munday; photograph by H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty (baby)

Our son’s room is almost ready. From the previous tenant—his sister, who’s two years old—he has inherited a changing pad, a pile of herniated books, and an armchair and ottoman, the color of whose upholstery, now flecked with who knows what, might politely be called gray heather. I wanted him to have something pristine, all his own, so I ordered a personalized baby pillow. With fifteen days to go until my due date, it’s turning into the “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” of soft furnishings.

We were going to call him Pierre. Then we were going to call him Louis, but Louis turned out to be the tenth most popular boys’ name in France, and the seventh most popular in Paris, where we live, and, even in this age of nominative nonconformity, we worried that he might enter school and find it crawling with more Louises than a chart of Bourbon monarchs. He’d have to become the Stammerer, or the Pious, or the Universal Spider (that was Louis XI, 1423-83, who apparently wove a lot of plots and conspiracies). Then we were going to call him Pierre again, until we realized that his initials would spell out a French-language homophobic slur. For a while, we didn’t care. (It was during this period that I bought the pillow.) Then an acquaintance with the same monogram deemed our choice “a bit risky,” and we decided that maybe we did. (It was during this period that the pillow was delivered.) We were beginning to resemble Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, the expecting couple in an old “Saturday Night Live” skit. They’re sitting on the couch, trying to come up with a baby name. The wife makes a series of benign suggestions. The husband, played by Nicolas Cage, shoots them down on increasingly far-fetched grounds.

Wife: O.K., I’ll just keep trying. What about Fred?

Husband (sighing): Please . . . Fred, Frank . . . please, the “F”s are no good. If he’s fat, it’s just a disaster.

Wife: O.K., all right. Um, Sam?

Husband: Great. Sam. “Uncle Sam.” “I want you . . . to be ostracized!”

The doorbell rings. It’s a deliveryman, with a telegram for Asswipe and Emily Johnson. “That’s Oss-wee-pay,” Cage says.

A name can rack a person from the hospital bracelet to the gravestone. Or it can boost his confidence, help him make a positive first impression, and, supposedly, give him better chances of everything from excelling in school and ascending the corporate ladder to not going to prison. (I checked, but neither author of a study claiming that professional baseball players whose names begin with “K” have a higher rate of strikeouts bears the initials “B.S.”) Carl Jung wrote of “the sometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man’s name and his peculiarities.” Is it any wonder that States Rights Gist, the son of a nullificationist South Carolina governor, attended Harvard Law School but died at the Battle of Franklin, in 1864, leading his brigade in a charge against federal troops? In Austin, Texas, there is actually a urologist, specializing in vasectomies, named Dr. Richard Chopp.

“Nomen omen,” the Romans said: the name is a sign. You don’t have much choice in last name—and, if it’s more than twelve letters long, your kid, no matter what his achievements in mineralogy or hydraulics, will never join the ranks of famous scientists immortalized on the side of the Eiffel Tower—but scrawling a first name upon a clean slate of a human being is a momentous responsibility. The problem is, there’s no consensual semiotics. Naming a baby is like trying to buy a house with no asking price and then trying to predict what that house will be like in thirty years, even if it moves to a different city or comes out as a transgender woman. (In 2016, the four girls’ names whose popularity dropped the most drastically were Caitlin, Caitlyn, Katelynn, and Kaitlynn.) Recently, I was surprised to learn that my surname, Collins, has become a more common first name for girls (No. 647) than Claudia, the name we gave our daughter (No. 761). “Until recently, no ‘s’ surname had ever come close to the girls’ top 1000,” the Web site Baby Name Wizard notes. “Collins has changed that, leaping from obscurity thanks to Collins Tuohy, the adoptive sister of football player Michael Oher, seen in the film ‘The Blind Side.’ Tuohy was given a family surname in classic Southern fashion, and parents who saw the movie liked the style.” Luckily, my parents chose to use my mother’s maiden name as my middle name, rather than calling me Zurn.

In Switzerland, one baby-naming consultancy promises to “create a new and independent name for your child,” for around the cost of a car. Unfortunately, the company’s name is Erfolgswelle. According to the Times, grandparents in the U.S. are increasingly offering things like family businesses and ten thousand dollars in exchange for the naming rights to their grandchildren. However, anyone who has followed the fate of a polar-research ship that the British government asked the public to name, via an Internet poll, will be sensitive to the perils of crowdsourcing. The public, by a margin of three to one, chose R.R.S. Boaty McBoatface. The British government took one look and thought, He’s really more of an R.R.S. David Attenborough. Unless you want to somehow reconcile the proclivities of every aunt who doesn’t like diminutives and every neighbor who knew a mean James, you end up drafting in solitude, even secrecy, one of the most public-facing statements you’ll ever make.

Unlike a friend of mine, whose parents, dabbling in Eastern religion in the seventies, each independently decided that they wanted to name a future daughter Lila—pronounced “Lee-lah”—and who, when it came time to name her own children, got Philo from the street her husband grew up on (it’s also the name of the inventor of television, the field in which they both work) and Winslow from, of all things, a birthing video (his namesake was a bow-tied septuagenarian obstetrician), I come from a family that is not strong on compelling nomenclature. My parents are John and Sue. My mother’s eight siblings—Marianne, Wendy, Nancy, John, Philip, Betsy, Jane, and Bob—sound like characters from a series for early readers. My husband’s French family had already laid claim to a problematic portion of the indigenous male names that did not sound like medieval troubadours and worked well in English. Did I mention that my brother and his wife were expecting a baby boy the same week? They had dibs on Henry. The pillow sat there like an unread diary. Your name is what you are. Your child’s name is what you want to be.

In the U.S., as the law professor Carlton F. W. Larson has written, the selection of a child’s name falls within “a legal universe that has scarcely been mapped, full of strange lacunae, spotty statutory provisions, and patchy, inconsistent case law.” Generally, you can’t use a pictograph, an ideogram, a number, an obscenity, or a name that is excessively long, but the regulations vary wildly from state to state and are often the domain of randomly applied “desk-clerk law.” It’s unclear whether you can call your son Warren Edward Buffett, Jr., when you have not actually procreated with Warren Edward Buffett. There are stricter and clearer criteria for naming dogs and horses than there are for naming people. (The American Kennel Club prohibits, among other things, the words “champ,” “champion,” “sieger,” “male,” “stud,” “sire,” “bitch,” “dam,” and “female,” while the Jockey Club recently went to court to block the registration of a filly named Sally Hemings, which has since been rebaptized Awaiting Justice.) Some of the rules have more to do with keyboards than with child protection. In California, amazingly, you can be Adolf Hitler Smith, but not José Smith, because of a ban on diacritics.