Weird, pretentious, or bizarre names...

Is it too soon for another “You named your kid what?” thread? Because I just saw the list of kids in my son’s pre-k class and felt like sharing. :smiley: In one class we have:

Jaxsen
Jaylen
Kai
King
Kinleigh
Maleyah
Ripley
Semi

Some of these are more out there than others, I admit. I’m dying to meet Ripley (is that a girl?) and find out if she’s named after the character in the Aliens movies. (Kinda cool, actually, IMHO.) That might be a mom I could be friends with, even if I did go with normal, non-trendy, old-fashioned names for my own kids.

Anybody else have some good names to contribute from the back-to-school lists?

A friend of mine does white dove releases for funerals. On average they do two each day. A recent funeral involved a deceased woman, first name Delicious. He had a short speech to make before the release and had trouble saying “Delicious’s”.
ETA: Cite!!

Doves at a funeral? Bloody hell. No reflection on your friend here (got to pay the bills) but that seems rather weird, pretentious and bizarre all at once. I’ve never heard of such a thing.

Also…do the doves come back? Because that sort of ruins whatever sentiment was intended.

The whole variant spelling of otherwise common names, I find boring and attention seeking.

There dove release people around here who have a dovecote in a central city that the doves are trained to fly back to.

There’s a hard range that they’ll work within, and a work associate was really pissed that her wedding venue was just outside of that range and the dove people would only do it if she added a hefty “insurance” fee on top of the normal charge - apparently the doves can only fly so far in a day?, or if they stay outside too long they decide to strike out on their own? or hawks eat them for dinner? or something.

I think she ended up doing butterflies instead. There aren’t enough eye-roll smilies in the world.

Just so this isn’t a total hijack, I attended college with someone named Precious.

They are white homing pigeons, trained to return to the loft. They usually beat him home. It is pretty classy; the doves are released from wicker baskets via remote control. They explode up from the baskets and circle the cemetery to get their bearings. Mourners love it.

ETA: /hijack!

Kai is a super normal Danish/Norwegian name. As a Scandiwegian, I think it’s kind of cool that it’s catching on internationally.

The rest of the names on the OP’s list are all bonkers (with the possible exception of Ripley). This kind of thing is why I can never become a schoolteacher: I would crack up constantly when addressing the kids by name.

None of the names in the OP bother me in the slightest. Of course, my kids have “stranger” names than those listed.

“Aren’t you afraid the other kids will make fun of it” has proven to be the wrong concern.
It’s the other kids’ parents that we must worry about.

In a lot of countries, there is a government-issued list of “approved” first names, and every child is required by law to be given a name on the list. Switzerland is one of them, that I know of (unless it was recently changed).

Would anybody here prefer that system?

We are expecting our first in February, a girl. So our discussions (negotiations) on baby names continues on a daily basis. Over the last 48 hours these two conversations occurred:

Wife: How about Mal? I like that name.
Me: Really? amused look
Wife: What?
Me: As in Mal from Firefly?
Wife: Oh, yeah. I still like that name, Mal.
Me: We can always name her Mallory and just call her Mal. big grin

And then this morning…

Wife: How about River? A snowboard flows down a mountain like a River. (I am an avid snowboarder)
Me: amused look River… as in River Tam?
Wife: Who? Oh, from Firefly. I still like that name, River.
Me: Me too baby, me too. big grin

Clearly I have been a positive impact to my wife’s culture influences. And I don’t think either option is weird, pretentious, or bizarre… right?

I really dislike when people start screeching about government overreach in the U.S. but seriously… this is way-way-way overboard. I’d be opposed to this on principle alone.

What is the justification for this type of law?

MeanJoe

Callander is actually my name, not sure if that counts and nope my parents were not at Woodstock.

I love the name River. I would totally go for that. Mal, not so much. It’s French for “bad” or “evil”. Also, it makes me think of Mal from Inception.

Anyway, I don’t mind weird, pretentious, or bizarre names per se. There is good weird, pretentious, or bizarre and there is bad weird, pretentious, or bizarre. My brother has the same name as a famous Roman statesman and general. Not exactly the most normal Anglo-Saxon style name, but I think it’s pretty awesome. (All I got was a regular boring name. Yeah, thanks a lot, parents.)

Just don’t give your kids names that are obviously stupid or that will make their lives harder, is all. That’s just failing the first test of parenting.

My wife works at a preschool where the kids are primarily African-American. She could spend days in this thread.

We completely support the idea that parents ought to be able to name their kids whatever they choose to. We just wonder if there’ll come a day when these kids reach adulthood and say “What were my parents thinking?”*

The only other comment I’ll make is that there was a thread recently proposing that the use of the apostrophe be discontinued (in fairness, the proposal was just its use in contractions).

All I can say is that the kids at my wife’s school would be in a lot of trouble if that idea ever caught hold.

  • Lest it be perceived that this comment has anything to do with race, we’ve said the same thing for years about parents who thought it would be cute to name their little girls Tiffany or Brittany or names of that ilk. One wonders how these little girls will feel when they’re 70 years old.

Nope. Now, if you named your son Zoe, that’d be weird.

The strangest case I’ve come across is a guy who introduced himself as “Mikel… it’s spelled like ‘Michael’.” Um, no, your name is actually ‘Michael’, dumbass. Start pronouncing it normally.

The list of eight “bizarre” names is probably a full third of that pre-K class.
The weirdness has reached a tipping point, which makes it not weird anymore, so “everyone else” with their “normal” names will just mean old people who haven’t managed to keep up. No need to worry about little Jaxson or Jaylen – their peers are not going to notice or get what the old folks are going on about.

Six kids, six pretty ordinary first names… and four very unusual middle names they can use if, when and ever they choose.

My feeling is there’s thousands of possible names with traditional or established spellings - choose one of those if you want to give your kid uniqueness. Don’t name them the same thing as everyone else (phonetically) and then use a fugged up spelling they’ll have to explain for the rest of their lives.

Jackson is fine. Jaxsen is not. James is fine. Jayms is not. Etc.

This is too true. Here’s the full class roster:

Aaron
Aiman
Allison
Amy
Darian
Jaxsen
Jaylen
Kai
King
Kinleigh
Maleyah
Preston
Ripley
Ryan
Semi
Shane
Will

I guess Aaron and Allison are actually in the minority now. But I still can’t help giggling to myself at the obvious attempts of the parents to be super yewnique.