Silas

Shortened from the Latin Silvanus, meaning of the forest, via the Greek transliteration in the New Testament. American Puritans adopted it in the seventeenth century as an earnest, non-papal biblical pick. It spent most of the twentieth century confined to rural cemeteries before twenty-first-century parents rediscovered its soft consonants.

The name suggests someone who owns a wooden balance bike and has strong opinions about oats. For decades it read exclusively as a nineteenth-century weaver or a villain in a melodrama. Today the statistical reality is a middle schooler with an allergy-safe snack. It sounds like corduroy trousers that cost more than they should.