Thursday, July 24, 2008

Name Shame

I've always felt sorry for children that have to live with the ridiculous names their parents gave them. For a while the oh-so-cute trend was to give your child a traditional name with a "creative" spelling, like my poor niece, Sydni. Then the isn't-that-sweet bandwagon was to smash together two common names creating a new hideous mutant lifeform, like Jennica, Janessa or Ambriah. Now the just-so-darling trend is to combine common syllables in "creative" ways. So take normal syllables like, tay, jay, kai, kee, mor, bree, or cam and attach it to lin, ler, non, gan, ly, or dan.

I thought the US had to be leading the world in the dumb names race. But we're not. Not by a long shot.

A New Zealand judge ordered the name of a girl in the middle of a custody battle to be changed and she would remain a ward of the court until the change was official. The offending monicker?

Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii

Oh dear.

Some other names that have been blocked are Fish and Chips, Yeah Detroit, Stallion, Twisty Poi, Keenan Got Lucy, and Sex Fruit. But unfortunately, these are still legal and belong to actual human beings, Number 16 Bus Shelter, Midnight Chardonnay, and Violence. I'll never again lament my son's preschool class roll of Morgan, Keegan, Taylin, Taylor, Jayden, Kylin, Kaylee, and Camden.

7 comments:

Aimee said...

Great post! Now I'm curious... what did you end up naming your children?

Ambie said...

I am not an advocate of the made up name. Occasionally I get a compliment on mine ( one of those listed on Ray's post) but it doesn't quite offset the frustration of having to spell it for every single person I come into contact with not to mention all of the misspellings and creative pronunciation.If I wasn't so lazy, I'd change my name to "Jane" just to remove some of the annoying originality.

Kristine said...

My favorite name story yet is a friend of mine who was substitute teaching. She had a class one time that included not one, but two girls named Cupcake. ???

My kids are all Juan, Jose, and Maria. Jose is usually a sweet kid. Juan is always trouble. And Maria never actually goes by Maria, so you have to learn each girl's secret spy name.

Heather said...

I read that article and actually felt sick. How humiliating for these children. Famous people do it only because their children will never attend a public school and the private school in which they will be attending would never make fun of such a famous person. Or so they think. They too will have a rude awakening when these poor kids and their less then beautiful names are forced to be around others.

Troy McClure said...

Those are all NZ names, right? I think I was vaguely acquainted with "Sex Fruit". If it's the guy I'm thinking of, he changed his name as an "adult" (in calendar years, anyway) to "Laurence Count Cinnamon Sex Fruit" or something like that. So he'd only himself to blame. I lived on the same street, but never really talked to him; I gather he was a bit peculiar though.

Cheryl said...

Good Grief!! They've come a long way from Snow White and Tinker Bell, haven't they? (Of course, my sister whose last name is Bell just had a baby and I was giving her lots of suggestions for names like, Alexander G.and Liberty.)

For the recors, I think Ambriah is a lovely name!! I can even pronounce it!!

Happy The Man said...

Hah, slightly off topic but I lived on a street named "Sonny and Sam Ct." (named by a Washington Redskins fanatic for commentators Sonny Jergenson and Sam Huff). I knew I was in trouble when I was contemplating purchasing the home but the market was a seller's market and I was lucky to have sold the home. Two months ago I moved from there and happily those "can you spell that?" and blank stare deer-in-the-head-lights responses have gone by the wayside.

How many different ways can you use "eesha" in a name? It's like nails on a chalkboard, yet at the same time causes me to laugh out loud. What are people thinking???