Moxie is an excellent name. I’m jealous I never thought of it. (Although I guess I could name my son Chutzpah). Middle names? Mine is weird too (not CrimeFighter weird, by any means). No big. Nobody really expects to know your middle name, so if she doesn’t like it, it’ll be easy enough to just make it C. In all, a good name.
Apple is also an awesome name.
–Cliffy
I don’t see any reason to get all excited over names. Today it sounds stupid; tomorrow you’re cooing over your own grandchild with that name. Names are completely arbitrary collections of phonemes, anyway. Fashions come and go.
Come on, those of you with British ancestry had forebears with names like Hermenjart and Gruoch. Your genetic lines survived the trauma.
In my experience, while one might suffer some minor discomfort as a child over an unusual name, it often becomes a treasured aspect of one’s identity.
Anyway, in Gwyneth’s case, the full thing’s “Apple Blythe Alison Paltrow-Martin.” She can always choose to go by “Alison Martin” if she wants.
Additionally …
Having a “normal” name is no guarantee of a healthy mind …
Charles Manson
Ted Bundy
Jeffrey Dahmer
Michael Jackson
Thanks. Thought so. Too bad Teller didn’t get the part. :eek:
He’s a nice guy too. No Seriously, I got to meet both of them after a College (Georgia Tech) show.
[slight hijack]
A friend of mine passed this supposedly real name to me:
Shaholarondra DiAquinita Jones.
[/slight hijack]
That is completely whack-a-doodle! I mean, really…JONES??? WTF? 
Actually, I’ve come around somewhat on this issue. At first, I simply thought the name was atrocious, and an unconscionable whim to impose on a kid. I also thought “CrimeFighter” was basically an outdated reference to an Internet humor bit that poked fun at formulaic screenplay-writing. “She’s a [fill-in-the-blank adj.] [fill-in-the-blank noun]; he’s a [repeat this formula with diff. adj. & noun]; together, they FIGHT CRIME!”
But now I think “CrimeFighter” is a really cute name… for a pet dog.
…What?
Ahh yes, like Springfield’s famouse two-headed goat:
Missed that episode. Rats.
Penn could have done worse. Coulda named the kid after his series on Showtime.
I don’t like weird names when they seem like something the person just made up to be trendy or that involve misspellings (like “Pilot Inspektor”), but in this case I kind of like the weirdness of the name. As someone with the middle name of Marie, I think it would be great to have a strange, funny middle name like CrimeFighter. 
Besides, from the impression I get of Penn, it seems completely in character that he would consider conventional names boring (how many people do you know named Penn, anyway?).
I expect he’ll raise her to have a sense of humor and a sense of individuality, so I can’t imagine that she’ll be traumatized by having an odd name.
Funny, I thought Shanda was her middle name, and her first name was Crystal.
Okay, I’d never name a kid of mine ‘Moxie’ but that’s just because it’s indelibly associated with a boating accident from the 1920’s. (Basically, rich brats out on the town took the boat out without Daddy’s permission, and with something like 13 people aboard. They all came back were drowned when the overloaded boat swamped.) I think it was just an early ‘death coming to people almost MY age’ story that stuck with me.
Other than that, I can’t say it’s worse than my new cousin’s middle name: Cyrilla. And that’s named after my grandmother. I think I’d rather be CrimeFighter than Cyrilla. (If I were female, that is. Since I’m male, it’s a definitely better name than Cyrilla.)
When I was working for an answering service that took calls for Wisconsin Health Organization(Medicaid), there were little girls named:
**
[ul]
[li]Tequila[/li][li]Massengill[/li][li]Bellemai[/li][/ul]
**
THOSE are mean names.
That’s what she wanted.
She’s still broken up over it.
I honestly thought Penn & Teller were lovers.
Why don’t you people tell me anything??
In the (highly recommended) book Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the last chapter talks about names; where they come from and why. Without going into the reasoning, there are several lists of names, grouped under various criteria. Two of the lists are “The Twenty White Girl Names That Best Signify High-Education Parents” and “The Twenty White Boy Names That Best Signify High-Education Parents”. From those lists we have: (girls) Lucienne, Marie-Claire, Glynnis, Adair, Meira, Beatrix, Aviva, Rotem, Oona, Atara, Elika. (boys) Dov, Akiva, Yannick, Elon, Yonah, Tor, Florian, Zev (I like that one), Kia, Ashkon (yes, with a k), Sumner and Calder. These are all recent names taken from birth records in California with at least ten occurences of each name.
Moxie doesn’t seem that weird. Hell, CrimeFighter doesn’t seem that weird.
While I can see the appeal of Moxie, I still think it’s weird. And CrimeFighter is just horrid! I also found the part about Teller having no comment hysterical.
The capital F may cause a little trouble here and there, but it’s mostly minor. Like someone else said, we have plenty of Mc names and such and they get on just fine. My best friend’s middle name is LeeAnne, and she said that occassionally she’ll run into situations where you are supposed to print in all caps. If it’s important (like her high school diploma), she finds out how to make sure the A is capitalized, which is usually just a note written in or attached to the form.
I met an Apple a few years ago. She’s in her early 20s, and her full name is Apple Rebekah Rose, but she does go by Apple. Like Moxie, I can see that someone would think it’s cute, but that’s not me.
As a substitute teacher, some other weird names I’ve come across:
Girls: Tequila, Quintheta, Drexena, and my personal favorite Y. That’s her legal first name, and what she goes by. Just the letter Y.
Boys: Jehovah (right up there in the running for worst name ever) and Whiskey. He went by his middle name, Coy, and I thought he was kidding when he told me his real name was Whiskey. But it also seems like everytime I subbed in his classroom, something official happened, and so I would get a chance to see his full name. He wasn’t kidding.
I know I’ve met more, but now that I’m trying to remember, I can’t think! I also like the name I ran across in a birth announcement once. The last name was Lukenbill, and they named their son Matthew Mark. I hope he has a good sense of humor, because that IS funny.
My family had fits (my wife’s family did too) over naming our daughter “Bryanna Kayleigh” and now, there’s a whole passel of Kayleigh’s running around. There are some poor misguided folks who thing Kali is pronounced the same way, but naming your child after a goddess of destruction is kind of cruel, in my book.
Kayleigh can be translated as “Highland Fling” or “Party” and that is oddly enough the name she herself gravitated toward. She is now officially B. Kayleigh and doing fine.
I like somewhat ambitious names in general. Among names we considered were “Derek Amadeus” and “David Alexander” Names that somehow challenge people without being in and of themselves odd.
Of course, I like Moxie, in some ways it reminds me of a character name I’ve always liked and was nixed by Mrs. ddgryphon: “Resolve” perhaps one of the coolest names in the world.
Not so much, perhaps, if you consider that Kali is also a goddess of creation and most of the destroying that is important to her mythological stories is the destruction of evil.
The problem seems to be the cultural disconnection. Westerners can’t get around the idea that a goddess of destruction is not evil.