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Oh, okay. Taken together with the repetition of French versions being prettier it gave the impression you had some sort of cultural thing going on.

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That said, I simply don't LIKE Matthew. I knew some bad ones and I find the name bland and boring. I like the sound of Mateo. I wrote Mateo because, as I said, I got it from the Spanish list, but I prefer Matteo, which is Italian, and my grandfather was off-the-boat Italian.

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Although I agree it seems somewhat odd for someone without the heritage to use certain names in some situations (how much more could I qualify that?), I don't have an overall problem. The naming pool gets a little shallow otherwise and there are some great names or variants of names from other cultures. Further, I try not to prescribe motive to other people's naming habits. They might have a good reason for using a name of a different ethnicity, and even if they don't and just like the sound, so what? I might look oddly at the very Irish family naming their daughter Svetlanka but I wouldn't think twice about it, really.