I believe the same laws agaisnt naming your child something stupid also exist in Quebec and are a part of Quebec using Napoleonic law instead of English common law. I remember reading a story in a Quebec newspaper about how some parents were not allowed to name their child “Spatule” (Spatula).
See, we don’t believe that here. Parents are not “agents”, but they are “caretakers” and as such have certain rights. Not to say that children are slaves, but having to get permission to name your child is seen as a gross interference of the relationship between the parent and the child. You don’t get a huge number of weirdly named children here. I think the worst I ever came across was a boy named Bradford Lee Bradley, shortened in school to Brad Bradley. And certainly a boy named Mitch is going to get all sorts of teasing simply by replacing the first letter of his name with a B, a D, or a W. The State cannot protect the children from everything, and we prefer to concentrate on the child molestors and the abusers and not worry so much about names.
Children get teased no matter what. If it’s not a name it will be something else.
I wonder if the judges would take into account just the first name itself, or how the first name goes with the last name. As in, “Ima” would be fine but “Ima Hogg” would not.
It’s nice to to know that, at least in theory, Denmark and France wouldn’t have any kids named OzWeepAy (“Asswipe”, from an SNL sketch). Or some of the celebrity-spawned atrocities (Sailor, Apple, Keanu, Satchel). as
I don’t understand what’s so atrocious about these.
“Apple,” while rare as a name, is not unique to Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter. And, while you might disagree, it strikes me as a good enough name.
“Keanu,” is a genuine native Hawaiian name, and I believe that it is indeed part of Keanu Reeves’s actual ethnic background.
“Satchel,” Woody Allen’s child, was named after the baseball great Leroy “Satchel” Paige.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that non-celebrities have used such names.
All this goes to show that this is really a matter of personal taste.
Tough words from a woman who named her children Dweezil and Moon-Unit.
And here in the US, the gov’t doesn’t get involved in deciding matters of personal taste.
[hijacking nitpick]
Keanu Reeves (as opposed to “Reeve”) is not the child of celebrities.
I, too, thought for the longest time that he was Christopher Reeve’s son.
[/hijacking nitpick]
Us Americans tend to get our backs up at things that seem like “government interference”. We don’t like much government involvement in our lives. But fair’s fair, so we pretty much don’t have any involvement in government’s life, either. 
Count me in as supporting reasonable limits on baby names. When you combine ethnic diversity with an individualistic culture as in America, you get some pretty pungent monikers.
As for your question, I think the “creativity” of the baby name is inversely proportional to the socioeconomic status of the parents. (This is not an original observation.) I know that when my family was going through some very hard times in the first half of the 1900s, they generated some rather interesting baby names. The thinking is something like, “I’m out of work, my family is going hungry, and I can’t afford a nice pair of shoes. But I can name my kid ‘Phineas Throckmorton Smith’ and it won’t cost me a dime.”
I named my kids Joe and David. Reverse psychology, see?
I think I’ll name my kid Keyshon Adolf Spocksucker Toad. What about alternate spellings of common names such as Cindi, Candi, Wendi, etc…?
Hey my name is legal in Denmark! My kids names are not, but Adolf is okay.
It’s funny when I tell people these naming restrictions exist in parts of Europe they think I made the whole thing up. Some people have accused me of lying. The idea that the government decides what is and is not okay to name you’re kids is really unthinkable here.
How do they decide which names are okay and which are not? The top 1,000 names? 2,000? Where’s the cutoff? Is it a handicap to get an unusual name like Chester, Ulysses, Grover, Lyndon, Rutherford, Woodrow or Millard? Men with all those names have been elected president. There’s never been a Mike in the White House though. Half the parents of NFL players would have run afoul of such a law.
My mom and my wife have completely wild names. Neither is a name really. My mom’s name is the Italian word for Liberty. My wife’s name was just made up by her parents and a Google search on it yields no results. My wife and mother somehow turned out okay.
Names in general are getting more unusual too. My son’s first grade and kindergarten classmates included kids named Solvieg, Sequoiah, Fatimzarah, Kjel, Povalis, Trey, Mateo and Lathan. Those are just the ones I remember.
Apparently my name is illegal in Denmark.
These names might sound unusual to us, but we don’t live in the 19th century, do we? (Lyndon Johnson was born in 1908…not sure if this was a common name back then.) Names are unusual or usual according to an historical/cultural/linguistic context. There has never been a prime minister of India called George or William…there has been one named Jawaharlal, which would sound weird to many Americans. If I told you my name was Homer in 1908, you’d probably think “Iliad and Odyssey”…what would most people think of in 2005?
That’s precisely what we’re saying. The US doesn’t have such a law, France or Germany have it. The point we’re arguing about if whether or not it’s reasonnabe to have this law on the books.
I think that in the list I read and mentionned above, some names were refused precisely for this reason.
The European laws go a whole lot farther than no child may have a stupid name. They are mandating a cultural uniformity.
I searched for the exact wording of the law, an indeed, it takes into account both the surname and family name.
- When these surnames, or one of tem, ** separately or associated with the other surnames or with the family name ** appear to him contrary to the interest of the child or to the right of third parties to protect their patronymic, the registry officer notify without delay the prosecutor of the Republic, who can refer the matter to the family affairs judge *
Do you have any rationnal and obious reason to think it’s crazy to state that the “right of the child not to be ridiculed” should prevail over “the right of the parents to give whatever name they want to their children”, or is it only, as a previous poster stated, that “What’s unfamiliar seems unreasonable”
Why so, apart from the specific Danish example where apparently an official list exists?
Clairobscur: Just to put a point on things, the word surname in English refers to the family name or last name (which are the same thing). The French word prénom refers to a personal name, including the first name and any middle names, I believe, rather than to the person’s last name.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=surname
In other words, surname is the English equivalent of nom, not of prénom.
The point here is that the French law does take into account the child’s full name, rather than the individual names included therein. So Ima Hogg would be prohibited, assuming that anyone noticed it before the birth certificate was officially recorded.
Some real-life words are also prohibited by most European countries. For example, Prince cannot be used as a name. That makes you wonder what “the artist formerly known as Prince and who has since changed his name back to Prince” would have been named if he had been born in Europe, rather than in the US. Would Sting’s name have been allowed? What about Madonna?
That’s amusing to me. The ancient Saxons made a point of having unique single names. Hence all names were made up. They were generally derived from existent elements, but the compound was supposed to be distinctive. E.g., Alflecht & Brechtlinde might name their son Brechtalf. Their daughter’s name might combine “-lecht-” with a name element from Brechtlinde’s family, or an arbitrary auspicious word. And most these elements are forms & variations of Saxon words. So there were traditional guidelines; it wasn’t too likely to find a Saxon named Ha-Jun-Li’ ; but each name was technically unique.
Similar compound-name approaches have used in periods of antique Hellenistic culture, by Chinese culture (natch), & by the Lakota.
I suppose some country could devise a system with onomastic consultancies to check that every child has a unique name, which frankly makes as much sense to me as the “Christian” insistence on copying :shudder: other people’s names :ick: .
If I lived in Deutschland, & wanted to name my child a compound name in the Saxon fashion, would they try to stick a Christian saint-name on my kid?