Oshin's name

It's perhaps worth posting specifically about Oshin's name, since it is new to most people, even those on the Isle of Man.

It is a Manx name, of Gaelic origin. It is the same name as 'Ossian,' which is the much more common rendering of it in countries like Scotland or Wales, and in Ireland it is 'Oisín'.
'Oshin' is the accepted Manx spelling, and it is how it is written down in its most famous oldest appearance. It is phonetic to how it is pronounced (for Manx people anyway - more on that in a bit!).
The most famous 'Ossian' is the apparent narrator of the epic Scottish poems, who is based on the most famous 'Oisín', the figure from Irish/Celtic mythology.
According the the authorities it means 'little fawn,' but we didn't choose it for the meaning (which is a little silly, if you ask me!), nor for his legendary forebear (which is rather foreign to us).
I don't intend to go on about it too much - I only want to talk about how we chose it, and the surprising confusion about its pronunciation - but I'll break it up with a couple of pictures which we took recently of the handsome fella (testing the light & background for the photoshoot which happened another day and which we'll post in a bit) - picture #1:

We were confident with the names for Finn & Orry, but we didn't have a good name ready for Child No. 3, especially once we knew it was to be another boy. All we had were left-over names from before, which had been left over because they were not-liked by the other person. (These included Dollin and Braddan for me, and Angus and Arthur for Cori). So we had to find a new name entirely.
'Illiam', Oshin's eventual middle-name, was ruled out because it would leave him having to spend his entire life tediously explaining: "Illiam - it's 'William' without the 'W'... it's Manx... from the Isle of Man." etc. even though we both agreed that it is a lovely name.

It was Cori who first started to push for 'Oshin', having trawled it out of one of the books/lists of names (though she pushed for 'Ossian or Oisin' until late on).
It was well-known to us from the traditional song 'Fin as Oshin', which meant that I ruled it out. - I knew that the song was about the hero, Finn, getting his vengeance on someone who had caused loads of trouble and set the village and Finn's sisters on fire and so Finn had them torn to pieces... This was not at all the sort of reference I wanted for our youngest son!
However, Cori knew better than to trust my memory and eventually looked it up, discovering that it was not Oshin who was the punished arsonist; it was Orry! - The story was actually of Finn and Oshin leaving Orry behind as they go off to hunt, but Orry retaliates to the women's taunting and teasing him by burning the whole village down (!), which Finn and Oshin spot and rush home to get their vengeance on Orry.
We had been completely against Finn punishing Oshin, or setting Oshin up as a troublemaker - but as soon as we found out that it was actually ORRY who was in the wrong and punished for it, we thought that it all sounded very reasonable and entirely true to character!
So the decisions was made.
Or, rather, we put that name to one side, as a valid option, meaning to go on looking for another possible name, but nothing else came up. And so we tried out the name, speaking about him as 'Oshin' before he was born, getting used to the name. It wasn't wrong, so it began to stick, and I agreed to go for it, on the condition that it was 'Oshin' rather than the more common Scottish or Irish forms. Cori agreed readily enough, if it mean that we were at least agreed on the name at last.
... which was how he came to be named 'Oshin'.

The most famous rending of the song, Fin as Oshin is this:

It's (hopefully) obviously in Manx - so if you're interested, the words are here.

We, probably naively, though thought that the name would be obvious enough for people away from Manx-speaking-circles to pronounce. However, we were both surprised at the confusion coming from the American half of the family/friends.

The problem was in the 'O', with people defaulting to pronouncing it like the capital letter, making the name come out sounding identical to 'ocean'.

We should really have seen this coming, as we had met the same problem with Orry's name, but it still caught us off-guard. It was particularly hard this time around as the explanations we gave to people only worked on one side of the Atlantic and not the other. So, we had to explain it to people in England as the 'o' in 'orange', but to Americans as not that 'o' (which sounds like the British pronunciation of the word, 'oar'). For the Americans it was explained as the 'aw' sound, which confused everyone British as that gives the sound of 'arr' for us.

It was all very confusing, and it probably will always remain just an off name in America which is hit-&-miss in the pronunciation, but Cori's final explanation on Facebook was the following:

Tell a story, Cori
Play some games, James
Put it in the bin, Finn
Don't be sorry, Orry
Do the washin', Oshin.

... It is strange that the easiest word for the cross-Atlantic pronunciation of Oshin's name used a 'a' for the 'o' sound, but such is the oddness of English!

Oshin's middle name is 'Illiam', which is the name of 'The Manx Martyr', Illiam Dhone, as well as being a popular and nice name. That choice was much simpler. Though we hadn't really put them all together until Cori's mom read the name off the bookshelf and asked if the baby was going to be called Illiam. It was that evening that the three were put together and "Oshin Illiam Franklin" sounded rather nice altogether and the name was officially capital D Decided. The initials are a bit unfortunate (OIF), but it is worth noting that these decisions were being made a couple days after he was due, so there wasn't too much time to really fuss over that too much!

So that was how he came to be called what he is called!
And, as the finish to the somewhat dull post, here is the other photo from the pre-photoshoot: