Taking the starch out of Baby Archie

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/05/2019 (2654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Unless you spent last week hiding in a drainpipe, you are well aware that Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle unveiled their first child, a baby boy, and hung the unexpected name Archie on the royal tyke.

It would be almost impossible for you not to be aware of this because we in the media covered this royal baby’s arrival with the same intensity we normally reserve for stories about Donald Trump making offensive tweets and Justin Trudeau being boyishly handsome.

It turns out Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor’s first name came as a bit of a surprise to almost everyone in the world, with the possible exception of some unnamed British woman who won more than $30,000 after placing a long-shot bet on Archie because she has a grandson of the same name who was born on the same day.

But the rest of us were caught flat-footed and forced to spend a great deal of time wringing our hands and perspiring heavily as we wondered why Harry and Meghan settled on the sort of, well, goofy name that will likely cause their son to have his head repeatedly dunked in the toilet by older boys with more traditional names when he gets to high school.

Based on dozens of online news reports I forced myself to read instead of doing actual journalism, no one seems to know exactly why the couple settled on Archie as the handle for their newborn, which is difficult to accept in the Twitter era wherein we all feel entitled to know everything, and know it instantly.

I have read stories that stated — and brace yourselves for a shock — that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex picked Archie because they like the name, as hard as that is to imagine.

On the other hand, I have also read breathless news reports stating the kid is named Archie after a beloved cat Meghan had when she was a kid.

“Meghan loved playing with him and she was always talking about him to her friends. It’s no surprise she named her new baby Archie. She loved that cat,” some of her friends have been quoted as saying.

But that is not the point. No, the point is that we, as right-thinking Canadians, need to spend a few vital moments looking in the mirror and asking ourselves the following pointed question: how do we, as a country, feel about the name Archie?

It’s not exactly a name that trips off the tongue, is it? The truth is — and it will probably be the same for most of you, I expect — I have never met anyone named Archie in the entire course of my life on this planet. The only Archies I am even dimly aware of are:

1) Archie Manning, who used to play quarterback in the NFL and is the father of two other QBs, namely Peyton and Eli Manning;

2) Archie Andrews, the fictional red-headed goofball from the Archie comics I used to read in the back seat of the family car when we went on vacation;

3) Archie Bunker, the lovable but fictional racist from the groundbreaking 1970s TV sitcom All in the Family;

4) and Archie Wood, the wooden puppet manipulated by “Uncle Bob” on the CKY-TV show that used to air when I first moved to Winnipeg in the early 1970s.

It is worth mentioning that when famously handsome actor George Clooney was asked what he thought of the name Archie, he referenced the comic books, stating: “It’s a good name. And it’s better than Jughead, too.”

It is hard to argue with logic like that, so we won’t. The interesting thing is, if you do enough online research, you will discover that almost no one in this country calls their kid Archie.

BabyCenter.com notes that Archie doesn’t pop up among the top 100 baby names for Canadian boys in 2018. B.C., which is where I was born in 1956, had five babies named Archie in 2018, compared with (wait for it) 225 tots named Liam.

In Manitoba, we are virtually Archie-less, as the name hasn’t popped up on our top 10 baby-name lists for as far back as I can see. Last year, the top baby name in this province was Lucas (or Luke), with 78 babies handed that moniker.

Lucas narrowly edged out Liam, which was the name given to 71 Manitoba baby boys in 2018, according to the Vital Statistics branch. In fact, Liam held the top spot in each of the three previous years, a fact that does not surprise a crusading newspaper columnist such as myself.

The reason I am not surprised is — and I am not making this up — my own son is named Liam. What’s more, my wife and I were early Liam adopters in the sense our son is now 32 and, back when he was born, the only Liam anyone had ever heard of was Liam Neeson, who, my wife insists, is ruggedly sexy.

For the record, I insisted we call our firstborn Liam because I was a fan of the fictional character Liam Devlin, a charming if ruthless Irish rogue who appeared in a bunch of Jack Higgins’ thriller novels, including The Eagle Has Landed, which focused on a plot to kidnap Winston Churchill.

While Archie is not big for baby humans, it is a bit more common among our pet dogs, according to Rover.com. It wasn’t a top 10 name for hounds, but it was the big selection among Canadians who named their mutt after a pop-culture reference, namely the comics-inspired Netflix series Riverdale.

What was even more exciting was that Rover.com features a Dog Name Generator wherein you input your first name, the year you were born and your gender, then click the button and it spews our your dog name.

“Your dog name is… ASHER! Yeah, you totally look like an Asher,” is what the website howled at me. “Doug was the 367th most popular male name in 1956. Asher is the 367th most popular male dog name today.”

The point is, the world is probably a more interesting place with a royal kid named Archie being seventh in line to the British throne.

Although Prince Jughead has a nice ring to it, too.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca