As a firefighter, Caden Troy Wilson thought he’d seen every kind of flame. Then Grandma heard his son’s name — and unleashed a whole new level of burn.
“She is not a fan,” Wilson, a first-time dad from Vero Beach, Florida, tells TODAY.com with a laugh.
In a now-viral Instagram clip, 96-year-old Louise Quigley meets her great-grandson, who was born Oct. 16. She’d known his name for months because Caden and his wife, Tori, both 29, announced it during her pregnancy. Unfortunately, time hasn’t softened the shock.
Quigley still can’t, for the life of her, understand why the Wilsons settled on Dax for their child.
“Why are you calling him Dax?” she asks, as the newborn dozes peacefully on her lap in a recliner. Tori explains that it’s simply a name they liked.
Quigley isn’t persuaded. She studies the baby with quiet concern. “You’ve got crazy parents,” she informs him. “So it’s going to be a wild run.”
In the comments, people shared stories of their own elders, many of whom had equally strong, and unfiltered, reactions to new baby names.
- “We picked a traditional name for our middle daughter, Brooke (1995), my dad said, ‘Nope,’ and called her Ruby from her birth to his passing.
- “When I named my son Zachary in 1987, my husband’s grandmother said, ‘Oh the new fangled names they’re coming up with.’”
- “I named my daughter Mariah. My dad didn’t like it said im calling her Maria with an H. And he always did till he passed.”
- “My son’s name is Louis and we call him Louie. My grandpa called it a ‘hobo name.’”
But according to baby-name expert Laura Wattenberg, Quigley has nothing to worry about. “Dax isn’t as unconventional as she thinks,” Wattenberg tells TODAY.com. “Over the past generation, we’ve seen an ‘-ax’ explosion, with parents flocking to names built around that sound.”
She points to Dax and Jax, as well as Braxton, Paxton, Axel, Maximus, Jaxon, and others.
“Perhaps she can think of it as a midpoint between Dan and Max,” Wattenberg says.
When the Wilsons were taking suggestions, Quigley offered up one of her own: Kevin.
“She thought that was a good name, that’s what she liked,” Caden says.
“She adores him,” Caden says. “But it’s so funny, we’ll be talking to her, and she’ll be asking questions like, ‘How is he sleeping?’ And then out of nowhere, she’ll just go, ‘Dax. You really decided to call him that?’”
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