We regularly socialized with a group of friends who thought they had a sense of humor. Chief humorist announces one night that he has the perfect solution to selecting a name for our upcoming addition, a sort of universal adaptable moniker. 

He suggests Knute would be a great name for a boy. The female version would be Knutine. So far we were not convinced of his seriousness. 

Then he suggests that the facility of this root extends even further. He says "and if you really can't tell the gender, the perfect name would be Knuter". All of our crowd thought so highly of this creative work that after Matthew was born, they insisted on calling him Knute, which went on for months. 

We then sold our Santana 20 Raspberry, and bought the SJ28 from a dealer in Tacoma, when Matt was about 9 months old. With a 3 brother-in-law syndicate, it was not easy to pick a name for the boat. Romantic / evocative names were too uncomfortable for some, in-your-face names were vetoed by others. 

So after a standoff on naming the boat for several months, I finally suggested that we should get the Knute moniker off of my son and on the boat. It turns out after all that an early version of Knute was Canute, a Danish King who had some naval forays into Scotland and England. Brothers-in-law finally said sure why not, and my son finally got his real name back. 

We've resisted painting Knutine on the dingy and Knuter on the Yanmar. Steve Poland SJ28 # 149 Knute Portland, OR