With hundreds of readers of PEOPLE's Celebrity Baby Blog expressing their opinions on Joel Madden and Nicole Richie's choice of Sparrow James Midnight for their newborn son, the site spoke to Linda Rosenkrantz, owner of NameBerry, as well as co-author of Beyond Ava & Aiden, to get her professional take on the moniker.
"After Nicole and Joel gave their daughter the inventive name Harlow Winter Kate, there was much anticipation about what they would come up with for their second child — and they didn’t disappoint with their new son’s name, the equally unusual Sparrow James Midnight," Linda says.
The two names have "a perfect almost twin-like symmetry, one being ultra-feminine and the other very masculine," explains Linda. "Sparrow has in the past been used for girls, but since the dynamically male appearance of Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s taken on a swashbuckling pirate persona — while Harlow projects Old Hollywood feminissima glamour."
But symmetry can go too far, and if there’s one problem it’s that Harlow and Sparrow "might be overly similar in sound and spelling, making it seem a bit like an outdated twin pairing," Linda notes.