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Former 'N Sync singer Joey Fatone and his wife welcomed a new baby this week, Kloey Alexandra. PEOPLE reports that Kloey's first name is taken from her parents' names -- Kelly and Joey -- and that Alexandra was chosen for the baby by her big sister, Briahna Joely. (Joely, we suppose, is also a mashup of her parents' names.) 

As we reported in our recent post on the Clay Walker family, mashup names are a key trend for today's American parents who want to honor family members without resorting to a "junior" (or, we suppose, a junior-ette). You can see what our own Name Lady had to say on the subject here. However, Fatone's baby names actually demonstrate another interesting naming approach: phonetic spelling.

Take Kloey. American parents are most familiar with this name when spelled Chloe, an anglicized name derived from the Greek meaning "blooming" or "verdant." Some of the reader contributions on the name in Namipedia highlight issues with pronunciation:

• "In Greek, it is pronounced hlo-EE (no K sound) and is an uncommon name."
• "Chloë and Chloe are both accepted spellings in English. A dieresis over the 'e' in Chloë indicates that the two consecutive vowels - 'o' and 'e' - are pronounced separately."
• "In France the name is written as Chloé and pronounced kloh-AY."
• "In the American south, some people pronounce it 'Cloy'"

Cloy?! Ugh! The spelling Kloey offers an unambiguous guide to the name's pronunciation. The same can be said for her sister: Briahna strikes us as far less likely to have her name mispronounced than Briana or Brianna might be.

(Side note number one:  Khloe was the first baby born in Alaska in 2010. Side note number two, for our readers who dislike Kreative Spelling: Khloe is actually closer to the original Greek than Chloe is.)

Phonetic spelling: A travesty or plain good sense? What say you, readers?

--L.R.