“The nurse looked at me like I’d lost my mind.”
A grandma’s love knows no boundaries. But a great-grandma’s love — that’s a different story.
On Oct. 23, Caden Troy — a firefighter and first-time dad from Vero Beach, Florida — took to Instagram to share a clip of his 96-year-old grandma, Louise Quigley, meeting her great-grandson for the first time.
While she certainly loved the little boy, she wasn’t entirely fond of the little boy’s name.
“Why are you calling him Dax?” she asked Troy and his wife Tori, who went on to clarify that Dax was a name they liked early on in the pregnancy.
“I don’t know,” Quigley continued in the video before directing her attention to Dax. “You got crazy parents, so it’s gonna be a wild run.”
Quigley went on to joke that it’ll be an easy name for Dax to spell, but not an easy name for the ladies to understand.
“When grandma has no filter,” Troy wrote in the caption, while adding, “Bruh grandma has been roasting his name for the past 20 min,” in a text overlay.
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In an interview with Today.com, published Oct. 27, the couple clarified that they announced the baby boy’s name earlier in the pregnancy and hoped it would grow on Quigley over time — but it didn’t.
They also revealed that Quigley offered a baby name suggestion of her own: Kevin.
Nonetheless, the great-grandma “adores” baby Dax.
“But it’s so funny, we’ll be talking to her, and she’ll be asking questions like, ‘How is he sleeping?’ And then out of nowhere, she’ll just go, ‘Dax. You really decided to call him that?’” Troy told the outlet.
The internet can’t get enough of Grandma Quigley’s reaction
It didn’t take long for the internet to fall in love with Grandma Quigley.
While some comments agreed with her and called the name “ridiculous,” others were simply looking forward to growing old so they can share their own unfiltered thoughts without repercussion.
“I can’t wait for this stage of my life where I just say whatever the hell I want with zero filter,” one Instagram user wrote under the video.
“When i get old im just going to tell it like it is too,” another user commented.
Other parents took to the comment section to share their own stories of family members having a hard time accepting the baby names they chose.
“When I named my son Zachary in 1987, my husband’s grandmother said, ‘Oh the new fangled names they’re coming up with!’” one parent wrote.
“We picked a traditional name for our middle daughter, Brooke(1995), my dad said nope and called her Ruby from her birth to his passing, it was Ruby,” another commenter wrote.
Is Dax as unique as Grandma Quigley thinks it is?
Despite what Grandma Quigley says, Dax is much more common than you’d think.
Sure, it’s nowhere near as common as the Liams, Noahs and Olivers in the world, but Dax has ranked in the Social Security Administration’s top 1,000 for boy names every year since 2007.
That was right around the time that actor Dax Shepard became famous — more specifically, it was one year after Shepard’s roles in “Employee of the Month” and “Idiocracy,” per IMDB.
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Its rise to prominence was also attributed to its similarity to other -ax names, such as Max, Jax and Axel.
In 2024, Dax was the 636th most popular boy’s name in the United States when it was given to approximately 438 baby boys, per the SSA.
But, believe it or not, Daxton was even more popular with 784 live births in 2024.
Other variations of Dax that were given to at least five baby boys last year include Daxtyn, Daxon, Daxten, Daxson, Daxx, Daxtin, Daxxton, Daxter, Maddax, Addax, Daxen and Daxston.
Unfortunately for those who like origins, the Dax name meaning is a little foggy.
According to Behind the Name, Dax could derive from the town of Dax in France or from the Old English given name Dæcca, which has an unknown meaning.
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Either way, it wasn’t popular in the United States until it was given to the main character in the 1966 novel “The Adventurers,” which was later adapted into a movie in 1970.
