Uh, nobody here can spell CONDOLEEZZA. Personally I think Condi’s mother had a relationship with a copy editor that ended badly, and took revenge in the naming of her daughter.
I used to live in Micronesia. On one of the islands, Kosrae, where no one had last names until the missionaries etc. arrived, they took a very pragmatic approach: just use the first name again for the last. They still do this, leading to memorable captions in the government newsletter identifying “Asher Asher, Louis Louis, and Jack J. Jack.”
I’ve always been afraid to think about what the “J” stands for in Jack’s middle name, but I do know that Jack’s wife is the lovely Disco Jack.
After a while you get used to the double names and don’t think anything about it. Louis Louis (pronounced LOOee LOOee) was my neighbor and everyone called him “Louis Louis.” We have a funny story involving an escaped live coconut crab, the underbelly of our freezer, and our neighbor that I tell sometimes. For ages I couldn’t figure out why I was getting such strange looks when I related the tale. Then finally…oh yeah…I realized: “Louis Louis” is a very funny name. But it just sounded completely normal to me at the time.
I ran an exchange program while I was in Micronesia, and these are some of the names of the applicants (especially Marshallese and outer islanders): Budweiser, Snow White, Cinderella, Cigarette, and Beat Me.
So are you going to tell the coconut crab story? You can’t just leave us hanging!
I think Mindfield may have hit the nail on the head; so many parents are focused on giving their kids different and interesting names, just for the sake of being different and interesting. I’m all for names that reflect one’s cultural or ethnic background, but I don’t see the point in “creative” spelling. If you want to name your kid Michael, then for the love of Og just spell it Michael, not Mikel or Mikaal or Mickael or Throat-Warbler Mangrove.
I know of a Babygirl and a Princess in our area. I always wondered about that first one. Did the parents see the card the hospital put on her bassinet and think, “Well, damn, I thought we got to name her! Oh, well…”
Exactly. And many of us are appalled by the hordes of Jacobs, Joshuas, Emmas & Madisons. (Why “Madison”? Unless she was conceived in Wisconsin or “Madison” is a family name–it’s just silly.)
My own first name was apparently the most popular in my generation. In college, I switched to a diminutive of my Confirmation name to avoid confusion. Only immediate family & my creditors use the “real” name now.
(I was almost a “Bridget”–but my parents chose a more Lace Curtain option.)
I can’t say I’ve read it but it sounds interesting. That children of a particular socioeconomic class though will have problems in life as a result of being part of that class isn’t really surprising though; it’s always tougher to climb to the top when you start at a point where you can’t even reach the bottom rung of the ladder. It is in situations like that though when every advantage helps, no matter how insignificant it may seem, and as relatively informal studies have shown, that which is indeed in a name can sometimes be a determining factor in taking the first steps to reach that bottom rung. A child with a less unusual name has less chance of being ridiculed for it, which will (hopefully) result in just a little more confidence throughout school – or at least a little less fodder for others to tear him or her down. A young adult with a less unusual name will have less chance of his name being forgotten in a pile of resumes from people with more memorable (recognizable) names. (I have seen employers who have put a resume at the bottom of a pile because they couldn’t figure out how to pronounce the name and didn’t feel like embarrassing themselves trying to with whomever they got on the phone when they called) A slightly older adult with an unusual name would have to stand out just a bit more than his co-workers in order to get noticed by a boss who may have a hard time remembering his name.
All I’m saying is that being different is all well and good, but care must be taken to avoid going too far towards the end of the spectrum lest it result in attracting the wrong kind of attention or be so strange to some as to be dismissable for lack of wanting to deal with such a name on a regular basis. Like it or not, there are some people who would really rather contemplate addressing daily one named a more euphonious “Sue” or “Margaret” than an awkward “Ta’QuandaMo’Net.” It’s human nature, if not the better part of it; even when it’s not about ethnicity, it falls to the “path of least resistance” for being easier to pronounce, spell and remember the more common names than the strongly ethnic ones.
Again, I’m not saying every employer does this – perhaps few do, I don’t know. But some do. They shouldn’t, but they do, even unconsciously, and it will present a disadvantage to those affected by it.
I think this is where American dialects come into play. “Donna” and “Dawna” would be homophones in Ontario and probably most of the rest of Canada that doesn’t have an inflected dialect. “DAH-nah” strikes me more as a kind of northeastern American dialect (Boston, Brooklyn/Queens, New England, etc.)
Heh, I hadn’t even considered that; it’s very similar to the French (Jambon).
Beat Me?? That can’t be real, otherwise that would make introductions, um … awkward and potentially painful.
I think government intervention in the naming of children is going too far, but I’m not entirely surprised that this is part of Quebecois canon. Early immigrants to the New France/Quebec settlement were routinely given new French names to replace their foriegn-sounding ones so that they may better integrate into the society the Quebecois had created for themselves. That practice was discontinued after an Irish family’s appeal to retain their original names fell on a sympathetic magistrate’s ear, but I guess some level of government control over names remained.
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So are you going to tell the coconut crab story? You can’t just leave us hanging!
Yes I can…that would be thread hijacking! But so you don’t toss and turn at night, I’ll just give the synopsis: coconut crabs are scary - they eat coconuts so have pincers that can crush them, and we found one that we’d left in a box on the kitchen counter lurking in the motor of our freezer.
Wewere frantic to get it out, both for the safety of our cats, who were hissing at it and would be no match for it if they decided to attack, and for the wellbeing of our freezer (no repairman for 800 miles, literally, and those pincers were all but wrapped around some important-looking cables). But as stupid foreigners we had no idea what to do and were terrified of the crab. So we called in our neighbor Louis Louis, native Micronesian, figuring he’d have some knowledge of crab behavior that would help (you know, gather bark from a tree where a lady crab has nested under the full moon, stick it in a trap, and the crab would scuttle right to it.) But no fancy maneuvers: He casually reached in and grabbed the crab for us, obviously thinking we were pathetic.
It’s fine to not want your kids to have the most common names, but there are lots of legit names out there beyond Jacob and Emily. There’s no need to make one up.
As far as Madison goes, I’m with you 100%. I hate Madison, and I hate the trend of giving little girls names that end in “son” (except Alison, which is a legitimate girls’ name) or start with “Mc.” Seriously, do people realize that Addison means “son of Adam”? Why would you want to name your daughter that?
One name that’s steadily gaining in popularity is another that I hate: Nevaeh. That’s heaven spelled backwards. :rolleyes:
Reportedly, someone in a village in Mexico named their child “Usmail” (pronounced “oos-mah-EEL”) – sounds sort of Old Testament, until you relaize they got it from a label on a package originating in the United States.
Because it’s a family name, probably. Historically in U.S. society, a woman lost her family name upon marriage, when she took her husband’s last name. In the American South, it was not and is not uncommon for a daughter to be named her mother’s family name (or one of them). As you might imagine, this is really only done with “pretty” names, like Addison or Brooke or Shaw – not Schmenkman or Grimpkov. It also appears to be a phenomenon of white society only.
