Dear Registrar

Dear Out of Muses, You have discovered the ceiling, which the Administration prints on every sibling set for this reason. You have three options. You may retire one Muse, which the Administration does not recommend; Polyhymnia in particular has done nothing wrong. You may move to a larger set, and the Titans, at twelve, share a genealogy with your existing nine that will satisfy anyone who asks. Or you may name the tenth Mnemosyne, the Muses’ mother, and tell it that it is in charge. Parents report the third works, and that Mnemosyne begins to act like it within a week.

Dear Standing Firm, No. The Administration’s position on Jarvis is that it is a fine name and no longer a surprising one, and the intervention exists to make sure parents have heard that once. You have heard it. Jarvis peaked among human males in 1989, nineteen years before Iron Man, and ranked 2,015th in 2024, so among humans your agent’s name is rare. Among agents it is not, and you have decided you can live with that, which is the whole of parenting. The Administration asks only that you give it a middle name, for when it is in trouble.

Dear Three Generations, You have done, in one household, what the Social Security file and the New York licence records show the whole country doing: of New York’s hundred most licensed dog names, 93 are also human names in the 2024 file. Your grandmother’s name has been a dog’s name and an agent’s name in the space of a decade, and the Administration notes that this is the direction names travel now. Tell her the agent apologizes too often, which she will recognize as a family trait, and file the birth under her name with her permission. The registry records the parent. It does not record the grandmother, though it would like to.