And he shall be called...

How do you name someone you hardly know?

(Jennifer Lew)

IN THE END, we named the baby Mack. First, we held onto the blank birth certificate for a few days. A blank birth certificate is an intimidating thing. At least, I was intimidated by it.

I understand that there are people who grab an indelible pen and immediately inscribe the name that they have been waiting nine months, if not decades, to use. This had seemed more reckless than judicious to me - how can you be so sure about what to name a person you haven't even met?

Had I thought about it more beforehand, I might have recognized the flaw in my approach: It's not necessarily easier to name a person you've only met briefly, and in difficult circumstances. No one involved is at his or her best.

It had been a complicated labor, and I had slept only in catnaps for two or three days. My wife had mostly missed out on the catnaps, even. Staring at the empty space for our son's name, I felt a welling of sympathy for the parents of children with names like Apple or Freedom. They had probably been very tired.

And people are severely judgmental about baby names. You may think a baby is ugly, but it must be a very ugly baby for anyone to mention, even behind its back, that it is less than adorable. But if the name comes out ugly - or trendy, or pompous, or silly, or any other of an endless list of flaws - it will be greeted with scorn.

While the parents are still within earshot, the scorn is best expressed in the form of a question: "How did you pick the name?" Luckily, this is also what people say when they approve of a name. The difference in inflection is subtle; make sure you say "did" lightly, with no stress or hesitation, and nobody's feelings will get hurt.

Not the parents', anyway. Sooner or later, the kid is going to be on its own. You make your decision and the playground reviews it. "Consider whether your newborn male will be addressed as 'she' for the rest of his life," the writer Choire Sicha offered by way of general principle, in all capital letters.

But whatever children may think about it, creativity (or novelty) has become the driving force in American child-naming. Long before I had a baby on the way, I became fixated on the Baby Name Wizard website, which has an interactive graph of the 1,000 most popular American baby names, male and female, from the 1880s through the present. You can watch individual names rise and fall - goodbye, Horace; hello, Aidan! - but you can also see the broader trends. In the 1890s, the most popular girl's name was Mary, which was given to more than 30,000 of every million female babies. By 2006, the most popular name, Emily, accounted for only 5,000 or so girls per million.

Tastes come in smaller and smaller niches. In 2005, Penn Jillette made news by naming his daughter Moxie CrimeFighter. That same year, according to the Social Security Administration, 13,413 American boys were named Logan, and 8,457 girls were named Hailey.

I would name a child Moxie CrimeFighter before I would name it Logan or Hailey - or Addison, Brandon, or Jaydon, to pick a few names from the most recent top 50. This is not an exaggeration. If we had triplets, for instance, I couldn't rule out using Moxie CrimeFighter for Baby No. 3. I can't come up with any scenario in which I would name a baby Jaydon.

See how easy it is to get snotty? But the right answer for you is the wrong answer for most other people.

The underlying question is, who do you think you are? This is why naming a baby is such a vexing problem. Most of us live most of our lives in a state of agreeable assimilation - surrounded by friends and acquaintances who share, or at any rate understand, our own everyday preferences. They know why you took your job, why you would dislike a particular book, or what your shoes or your couch may be meant to communicate about you.

In the maternity ward, with that blank certificate in hand, you are yanked out of that anodyne condition. Your child is born with an identity tied to older connections - family history, ethnicity, class, religion. The rules that result are often tacit ones. Nowhere in my family tree, for instance, have I heard of a IV or III, or even a Jr. Nor does anyone recycle old last names as first names. No one is named Sean, or Shaun, or Shawn, or Shawne. It wouldn't occur to anyone to do it.

The Massachusetts Health Department reported that the most popular boys' name in the state last year was Ryan. That's a perfectly good name, but my great-grandparents were born on the wrong side of the Alps for me to name a son Ryan.

My wife's ancestors, meanwhile, had been in China. Besides ruling out Marco (as in Polo? Not happening), that brought another set of limitations. Names that sounded sturdy and age-patinaed to me - Calvin, for instance - sounded to her like the unstylish names that other Chinese-immigrant parents had inflicted on their children.

Family names weren't a very fertile source of inspiration; nearly half the men in my extended family are named John. My own name is miraculously neutral. Till I sat down to write about names, it had never crossed my mind that Tom Brady, Tom Wolfe, and Tom DeLay shared a name, let alone that I shared it with them.

But plain names were surprisingly hard to come up with. We wanted something that sounded ordinary, a little old-fashioned, preferably with a hard consonant in it. The list came down to Mack, Jack, or Garnett - as in Kevin, my wife's favorite basketball player. This was before Kevin Garnett got traded to the Celtics, which is one reason why it's dangerous to name a baby after a famous person; I grew up rooting for the Sixers. (Dozing on a hospital couch, I had a fleeting inspiration to name the boy Barkley.) Fortunately, when we did see the baby peeking at us from under an outsized knit hat in the delivery room, he seemed too wee and plucky to be a Garnett.

The delivery took place in Beijing. The Chinese approach to naming is more direct than the American one - not "How did you pick the name?" but "What does the name mean?" Here, people are named things like Build the Nation or Snow Plum or Maximum Flying Range.

What does the name mean? On the hospital's shaky wireless, I consulted the Internet. The first page of Google results for "Mack" included Mack Trucks and the blaxploitation classic "The Mack," while "Jack" brought up the lowest-common-denominator Jack FM radio format.

Moreover, my cousin had already had a Jack. And I'd only ever met three Macks, as far as I could remember: the Baltimore boxing trainer Mack Lewis, a Chinese friend who uses Mack as his English name, and the proprietor of Mack's Barbershop in Churchville, Md. On the Baby Name Wizard, "Mack" peaked in the 1890s and plunged off the chart over the following century - odds were, there wouldn't be three Macks grappling with the five Logans for crayons in kindergarten. After a run through baseball-reference.com to make sure it hadn't belonged to any famous Yankees, Mack it was.

After consulting with his mother's parents, we added a Chinese middle name, suitably straightforward: Zhong-Sheng. It means "Born in China." But once Chinese people hear the name "Mack," they have another idea. "Xiao Pingguo," they call him when they're introduced, meaning "Little Apple." This happens a lot. They assume he was just named after the computer.

Tom Scocca is a writer in Beijing.