Sorry to be confusing. This was Chanta’s mom, again according to Chanta. Sorry if you think she’s a “stupid stereotype”–she was a person I worked with, not stupid at all, but she had a stupid name. I do know of white girls who had kids at 14. I don’t know of any rich girls that did.
Chanta, as mentioned. Treycee was oriental.
This is true. I knew or knew of the following people: Stuffy, Twist, Puddin, Skeeter, Salty, Tweet, Bobbin, Kayper, Kimmer, Fabby. These people are all women, all filthy rich, and I think their name are ridiculous too. Of course these are not their real names, except for Kimmer and Twist, but they are the names they have chosen to be called. It astounds me that a woman entering her 60s can prefer Puddin (pronounced like “pudding” only drop the G) to her given name.
When a friend of mine told me the name she picked for her son–Rafer–I could not hide my disbelief, even in person. Let me just say that, combined with his last name, this was a particularly unfortunate choice in my opinion. Which as you might guess did not matter to the mother at all.
I also had a college friend who named her daughter Georgette (in 1975!), after her beloved and recently deceased childhood pet, a cocker spaniel. Yes. She named her daughter a name that was not only ugly and out of fashion, but had previously belonged to a dog, because she just loved the name. So–I’ll throw another ethnic stereotype in here–my friend is Jewish, she had two sets of dishes, I thought they had rules about names, too. Georgette? Yeah, I think this was stupid. Maybe stupid is a little harsh. I was thinking this friend might have had just the one too many psychedelic experiences. So, was Georgette a nice kid? No; she was a hellraiser.
No. I really don’t think I phrased it all that strongly. Although I admit to a long list of names I would have not named a kid, given the surname. For instance: Chevy Chase, Learned Hand, Armand Hammer, Safety First (a doctor in Tulsa, not as well known as the others on this list and outside of Tulsa known chiefly on account of the name). I don’t have any kind of problem with whatever somebody names their kid, it’s their right. But I do have the right to snicker behind their back.
Or think about this. Some black child is named Antwan. At school he’s asked his name (or his mother is), and on hearing “Antwan” the teacher–who will, we hope, be an educated person, who knows how the name is usually spelled, will say, “A, N, T, O, I, N, E?” In a certain context this itself might be perceived as negative by the child–as a problem. At any rate it’s certainly going to be repeated many times. Eventually somebody is going to tell him he’s spelling it wrong. Someone said that however someone spells and pronounces their name is correct, and that’s true, once it’s your name, it’s your name. But this kind of thing eventually could cut Antwan out of the mainstream, if that’s where he wants to be.
“Antwan,” actually, is a bad example. If I heard “Antwan” and didn’t know how it was spelled and needed to know, I would ask. That spelling has become popular enough to enter into mainstream.
I’m just saying, basically, not all of these people were named with intent. If someone is named Ntozake that is cool, I kind of admire that name (although I would have to take notes on how to pronounce it) and it sounds like some research and thought went into it, unlike Chanta, whose mother couldn’t even be bothered. I think it’s fine if blacks, or anybody, harken back to their heritage. But a name like “Ortralla” is obscure, hard to spell, and just plain ugly, and I don’t know why anyone would lay a name like this on a kid unless there was some kind of inheritance attached to it. [Note that I latched onto “Ortralla” from a criminal case. Ortralla was not the criminal. The name may actually be “Otralla” as it was spelled both ways in the news story.]
Well, thanks. Can I use this as my sig line?
