DKW:
Jeez Kira Nerys…I understand wanting to avoid giving the child an embarrassing name, but I always thought avoiding the obvious blunders was good enough. Like “Seymour Butts”, or “Hugh Jass”, or “Amanda Hugginkiss”. (C’mon, we’ve all watched The Simpsons! :)) Now we have to watch out for legitimate medical terms?? Do you have any idea just how many terms covering all the diseases, dysfunctions, disorders, imbalances, malforms, adverse conditions etc. etc. etc. there freaking are?? I took one little medical transcription course once, and by the end I felt like I’d been through three seasons of Chicago Hope.
And what’s with the judgement? “HOW could she have possibly missed THAT?” Well, perhaps it’s because she honestly had no freaking idea what a genital fissure is, and it sure as hell isn’t a matter of intelligence or worldliness because I didn’t know either. How far is a parent expected to go? Should she bring in experts? Run everything through five Internet databases?
Maybe it’s just my work in public housing. Believe me, if you don’t learn to get used to funny names very quicckly, you won’t last a month.
(My mother once had a professor named Charles Barclay. Every time I think about it, it strikes me how that’s actually a much more appropriate name for a quiet white middle-aged academic than…you know.)
True, “fissure” isn’t exactly an every day word, but “Gene Attell” said out loud a couple of times seems pretty obvious to me. The fissure part is just a dubious bonus.