Alicornutopia

What about a society where people name themselves sometimes before they reach adulthood?
It could be a huge part of the culture, and choosing your own name would be one of the biggest decisions you make. There would be a big ceremony where you announced your choice.
Before then, children could be called by a variety of nicknames.

If someone who hadn't chosen yet stumbled into fairyland and ate berries, they could honestly reply, "I don't know" when asked for their name.

A clever fairy could probably make such a person narrow it down to things they were called early in their life, but yeah, if childhood nicknames are fluid enough, the first one wouldn't necessarily be memorable.

I was also considering some sort of structure in which one's first-ever name is ritually sacrificed in a solemn ceremony shortly after one's birth. The baby can't be named before that because something something religious reasons, the baby and parents can never know the ritual name because it's not much of a sacrifice if you can keep it afterward, and the priests who do this sort of thing don't keep records. If you got your hands on a priest, you could make them tell you as many baby names as they remember, but of course they don't necessarily know anything about the identities of the babies attached.

I'm undecided whether newly spawned Neuroi are named or not. Whoever's fighting them usually ends up naming them if not, even if it's just "threat echo-34"

Shortly before birth, someone (two someones) assign a short string of unpronounceability designed to be easily forgotten. Then they slice it into pieces, and alternate phonemes so neither of them knows two consecutive pieces of the resulting string of unpronounceability. Maybe they can do the cutting letters out of newspapers thing and assemble the final product face down.

After the baby is born and nameable, the parents know better than to call their kid by what they intend to be the actual name. They wait until someone has a chance to haul in a neighbor half-asleep and have them mumble off whatever's written on this piece of paper and forget it. (Amnestic drugs or magic might help here.) Then the parents name their kid an actual name, and then they call the kid by a completely different name just in case something went wrong.

The two original strings can be preserved and locked in a vault somewhere, in case someone gets vassaled and their name might be useful in rescuing them. Depending on paranoia and ethics, the humans might keep a fairy vassal around specifically for this.

Nice.

That might be a good convention for a human colony in fairyland.

It's from when Scadrial evacuated to Fairyland, so you're not wrong. It just never came up in- or out-of-thread. Could also apply to humans on a world being colonized by fairies, if for some reason that ever happens.

Nick made an AI that he cannot override will attempt to detect when he is under orders. It is not a person, but has a fairly complicated nested layer of strategies to make him no longer under orders, the first of which (after 'escape the fairy who is giving you orders, by force if necessary') is to find Promise and try to get her to rescind them.

Alternately, it’s said in thread that a consonant alone is insufficient. Name all kids Mmmm, Nnnn, Ssss, Zzzz, Shhh, or similar.

Well, now my plan just feels redundant.

Unless anything insufficient to count as a name for shortening purposes also can't count for having a name? Then it'd just be the first name that has at least one syllable that counts.