Friday, July 30, 2010

the name game

Naming your kid is a big responsibility, we all realize this is not easy and I have a friend who is asking her for help on Facebook for naming her 2 day old daughter who has gone with as Jane Doe for 48+ hours already.       I for one don't think there should be such a rush for naming your child; they will be stuck with the name for the rest of their lives unless they pull an Ochocinco or something else similarly bizarre.   Now we all know how cruel kids can be on a playground, do you really need to set your kid up for failure by naming them something as idiotic as Apple (but really what can you expect from the dude from Colplay, he's as creative as a Mop commercial )

I don't think the government should interfere in most aspects of your life but I do think they need to step up if your parent's have gone David and Courtney Cox-Arquette on their newborn. 

There really are a lot of ways to screw up a kid's name but the three I detest the most are: 

Going Hippy

If your nickname is Sunflower because you smoked a lot of pot and had a lot of unprotected sex it's one thing, if your name is Sunflower because your parents did than it might be time to get your own tubes-tied.   Hippy names are cruel and should be punishable by death

 

Naming your kid after a consumer item

 I've heard kids damned with names like Cristal and Lexus and whenever I come across them I can't imagine how incredibly stupid you have to be to name your kid something as idiotic as a luxury item.   It's as if people have wish lists of luxury goods they want but may not be able to afford so I guess the next best thing would be to curse your kid by naming him that.

 

Giving your kid a name when you had a different intention

As asinine as it is to name your kid after a bad bottle of champagne it fails in comparison to giving your kid a name of a word you don't understand correctly.   I know of one poor girl with the injustice of having been named Envious.   Now I have to imagine that there was a complete lack-of-education or at least lack of word-comprehension when this girl was named as I'd guess her mom and dad were going with the whole concept of naming your kid something that is desirable like (Joy or Happy which are incredibly stupid also) and were thinking they were trying to come up with Envied.   What they probably didn't realize until the birth-certificate was printed was that they didn't get a desirable name but instead got one of the seven deadly sins.


Intentional Misspelling

Now I get that people may confuse big words like envious and envied and I have even heard of a girl whose parents used script when writing her name of the paperwork for her birth-certificate and she became known as Deffie instead of Debbie but even this you can overlook as it wasn't intentional.  What I really can't stand is intentional misspelled names for example I met a woman named Jennafer the other day.   

There is a website dedicated to helping parents with these 'creative' names with an entire section dedicated to intentional misspellings.    Now this is troublesome on two levels, the first being that the idea of naming your daughter Jessyca instead of Jessica is incredibly stupid but the issue will be that people will never know if the misspelling was intentional or not.   So either she comes across as having stupid parents who thought being creative was sound parenting or they come across as having stupid parents who can't spell…

 The good news though is that TOR will have a regular feature whenever we come across an idiotic name

No comments: