Mayor Bloomberg’s Daughter Just Figured Out An Excellent Answer To ‘Whose Name Does The Baby Take?’

Keeping one’s original surname is a pretty normal thing for a woman to do these days. (The New York Times calls it “fashionable.”) Few people will blink at a woman opting not to change her name when she marries, but that does raise the question: Whose name does the baby get if they have a baby?

There are several options, all good. The baby could take the father’s surname, or the mother’s surname. The baby could have a hyphenated surname. Depending on the names in question, the baby could even have one surname as a first name, and one surname as a surname. That worked well when Carol Channing married Alexander Carson and they had a son named Channing Carson. (“Carson Channing” would also have worked.) But former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg‘s daughter Emma Bloomberg recently had a daughter with her husband, Chris Frissora, and they opted to name their baby Zelda Violet Frissberg.

I love everything about that. Zelda Violet is a fantastic and very cool baby name, and I like the hybrid surname they came up with. It’s a cool way to combine both names without a hyphen, and “Frissberg” sounds like a pretty normal surname anyway.

Bloomberg and Frissora say that “Frissberg” has been their “couple name” for a while now. I think most long-term couples wind up with one of those, like Bennifer or Brangelina. (My friends always just called my partner and I “Elizanick.”) The couple name seems to have ported over pretty nicely to Zelda’s surname.

I suspect this would not work so elegantly with all surnames, but in this case it turned out pretty nice. Would you ever consider giving your baby a hybrid surname? Let know in the comments.

(Photo: Shutterstock)