In this day and age, it is simply common sense for a pony’s name to match their skillset. As a trend, this started a short time after the Discordian era, in which our Princesses were born. At that time, giving your newborn a meaningful name was just asking for trouble; Discord was always looking for inspiration for his games, and what better starting point than some good old fashioned irony?
It was well within the despot’s power to alter the minds of his subjects, but sometimes he would take to more practical methods of redirecting their fate, just for the thrill. A sabotage here, a broken leg there, and your daughter Wind Sprint was set for a life of sedentary labor. Or better yet, she took up baking, and learned to make the best cookies in the realm — while you developed a powerful gluten allergy. No, far better to choose a boring name, one that would sooner bring your ruler to roll his eyes than to crack a smile. Plus, the former was easier to clean off the floor than the chunks of teeth.
Finding a “boring” name for your children would seem to be a difficult task, but it turned out to be quite doable as a group effort. Said effort was undertaken by various settlements, multiple times per generation, establishing a standard naming scheme for the foals born in the next year or so. Some of these were more successful than others. For example, some settlements tried purely descriptive names, such as naming a pink foal “Pinkie” or one with a multi-hued mane “Rainbow”. Others established a single name for the year, and required all parents to use some variant of the name; this was boring up until it wasn’t, and Discord was unfortunately quite intrigued by the many potential pronunciations of “Kaeighlaeighye”. One town tried the route of reverse-psychology, giving their foals names with negative connotations in hopes of tricking the chaos god into granting them a better fate; this was abandoned soon after Fullbodywing Andhoofcast was convicted for several aggravated assaults, at least the first time. In desperation, some ponies even turned to random name generation, in hopes of appeasing their chaotic overlord; this was frankly the most successful, but pulling each letter from a hat and finding a usable arrangement was almost as exhausting as pronouncing the result. There were many other standards employed, but what’s most important in this case is that the original names of Equestria’s rulers would have been primarily defined by where and when they were born.