Actress Amanda Peet and her husband screenwriter David Benioff welcomed a second daughter this week.  The new baby girl is named Molly June and joins an older sister whose name is Frances Pen. The girl's name Molly was originally a pet name for Mary, but in recent years, Molly has become a given name all its own. It currently ranks 104 on the Social Security

Gesundheit!

One of the biggest names in the news right now is also the most unpronounceable: Eyjafjallajoekull, the glacier atop the erupting Icelandic volcano that's wreaked so much havoc upon air transit and the tongues of newscasters alike. Not that newscasters haven't struggled valiantly, as you can see in this video compilation of flubs. Turns out Icelandic is very hard.

Anyone who's ever had to correct the pronunciation of her name ("No, it's TARR-uh, not TAY-ruh") knows how frustratingly common mispronunciation is. But rarely has a name posed such an international crisis of enunciation.

On Thursday, the brain trust of the National Football League will gather in New York for their annual college draft. You can turn to the sports pages for breakdowns of players' tackling skills and 40-yard-dash times. But here at NameCandy, we know what really matters. Meet the 2010 Draft Most Memorable Name Team:

Grace Kelly is this month's Vanity Fair cover story.  Ms. Kelly passed away years ago, and yet she, like Diana and Jackie, continues to capture our attention, to ignite our curiosities, and to prompt us to buy magazines.  A Vanity Fair article reports that soon the Victoria and Albert Museum in London will display a collection of her clothes and other accessories, and recentlyThe New Yorker ran a long piece on Ms. Kelly and a recent biography.

Why does Grace linger so strongly in our minds?  She was certainly beautiful, and enigmatic. Check out the

Norris Church Mailer, the last wife (as she refers to herself) of famed playwright-novelist-journalist-man-about-town Norman Mailer, is now out with a book of her own.  A Ticket to the Circus is a memoir that chronicles her transition from provincial school teacher and single mom in Arkansas to jet-setting sixth wife of one of the 20th century's most famous American writers. 
Ms. Mailer has clearly lived a full life. (For the full-color version pick up the book or read this lively review in the New York Times)

Sean and Rachel Campos-Duffy of Real World fame recently announced the birth of their daughter, MariaVictoria Margarita Duffy.  Celebrity Babies led us to Sean and Rachel's Twitter accounts, where their tweets tell of MariaVictoria's birth on April 1.  This little girl joins sisters and brothers Evita Pilar, Xavier Jack, Lucia-Belen, John-Paul and Paloma. 

Now we must admit some uncertainty -- is there or isn't there a space bewteen Maria and Victoria?  Some sites reporting her birth include a space, but most do not.  And though Twitter is an informal forum, to say the least, it looks like there is no space in the Duffy's birth tweet.  So we are going with MariaVictoria as one compound name.  What do you make of this combination?  Does it work for your tastes, having the two names become one? 

We did a little exploring on MariaVictoria Margarita on Baby Name Wizard's Name Voyager and Namipedia:

Florence, Grover, Lester, Claude and Walt: these are names you'd find in 1890s bassinets (when Grover Cleveland was president and hot air balloons were giddy fun). You'll also find them on characters in Noah Baumbach's ouevre. On our radar right now thanks to his new movie, Greenberg, the writer-director has, in the words of one critic, "a knack for capturing the regressive, self-absorbed, juvenile side of the adult human condition."

He also has a tendency to give his characters names like Roger, Carol and Bernard: unabashedly fusty, they nevertheless exude a particular appeal which, like mumblecore movies themselves, annoy some, charm others.

This quality was already apparent in Baumbach's writing and directorial debut, Kicking and Screaming (1995),

Happy Birthday, Loretta Lynn! The country music legend reportedly turns 75 today. Let's take a look at her name.

According to Teresa Norman's A World of Baby Names, Loretta is an English-language spelling of the Italian name Lauretta, which comes from Laura (or laurel). The name was popular through the end of the 19th century, and peaked at #81 in the 1930s (when Loretta Lynn was born). From this pronounced high, the name had a long, steady decline, dropping off the charts in the 1980s.

But Loretta Lynn made a big comeback in 2004 with her album Van Lear Rose. Will her name do ths same? It's possible.

With spring upon us, we've been wondering: how often do celebrities turn to the spring season for naming inspiration?  Earlier this year we wrote about The-Dream and Christina Milian naming their little girl Violet.  This got us thinking about botanical names (opens up the category more than calling it "flower names").  Check out that post for a full listing of what we and our readers had to say, but here's a sampling of botanical names: Daisy, Iris, Magnolia, Rowan and Heath.  But what about month names, and the name of the season itself?  How do such names fare in celebrity baby naming?

We decided to do a little research on our Celebrity Baby Names Lookup:

Spring

We admit it.  We loved the movie Hot Tub Time Machine. Not just because it was laugh-out-loud funny, but because so many of the details were so dead-on in terms of how we remembered teenage party films of the 1980s. Do you think these Hot Tub Time Machine character names were well-chosen? (read on!)