StorkBytes: A Resource for What Not To Name Your Baby

[Baracus]

@yellowval

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:

I don’t really understand the concept of naming your kid a commonly pronounced but uniquely spelled name. Unless you introduce yourself as “so-and-so spelled blah-blah-blah” most people won’t know the difference until they misspell it. I would rather be remarkable by some quality other than spelling my name “Brighunn”.

The trends in baby naming are strange. Our initial inclination for our daughter’s name was Lilly. We ultimately decided against it because we didn’t want it to appear that we named her after my wife’s annoying/absentee grandmother. Glad we did because like 20% of the girls her age we have encountered in daycare, etc, have been Lilly’s. I can think of one or two minor characters named Lilly on TV recently and no major celebrities, so how’d that happen?

[yellowval]

@Jodi

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.

I’ve got no beef with family names. Sadly, I’ve never met a Madison, Addison, Taylor, or even Tyler who was given the name because it was the mother’s maiden name. The problem is that some people use them because they’re family names and other people latch onto these names and they become popular. Before long it’s not just Madison, it’s Madycynne, because they want her to be different. My pregnant friend and I were discussing names last weekend and she said two of her co-workers just had baby girls named Addison. The odds of them both having the maiden name Addison is highly unlikely. (There are two Addisons listed in the local phone directory; not a common name around here. If they were named Miller I’d totally believe it.) On the top of my friend’s list for girls is Margaret. I love her.

[Gala_Matrix_Fire]

My mother’s maiden name is now a very popular name for little girls, which is a bummer for those of us in the family who wanted to use it. Now it would just sound trendy. But I swear, it really is our family name! (No, I won’t tell you what it is).

[Hilarity_N.Suze]

So how’s this for a name: Rose Mary Echo Silver Dollar. (No, “Dollar” is not her last name.)

[TheLoadedDog]

One thing I’ve noticed here in Sydney is that the most popular names are more dominant than ever.

When I was born, “Jason” was popular. So if I hear the name “Jason” now, I will assume the guy to be in his late 30s. There were one or two other names popular here at the time too. Darren was one. Now, we knew they were popular because my class might have TWO Jasons and TWO Darrens. But now, I have heard stories of classes having FIVE OR SIX kids called “Jayden” I’m sure if I were to walk past a busy playground and yell, “HEY JAYDEN!!”, half the kids would look up. Ten years ago it was the same with Joshua.

I don’t understand why the pool of names is getting smaller.

[gotpasswords]

@Mindfield

Ke’Zieah Mo’Net (Apostrophes are in vogue)

And what are these people going to do when it’s time for an email address and they find that their apostrophes can’t be used?

There’s going to be lots of hurt feelings when this kid gets mashed into Kezieah.Monet@company.com

[Hypnagogic_Jerk]

@Mindfield

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’s not at all unique to Quebec. Plenty of immigrants to North America have had their names truncated or otherwise modified when they arrived, be it in Grosse-Île or Ellis Island or wherever. The bureaucrats in charge of registering their arrival often didn’t care about the correct spelling of their names, or wanted to simplify it.

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.

That sounds a lot like a Heritage Minute I saw at some point. I don’t know what the actual story is.

This said, and if I’m allowed a slight hijack, I briefly want to – again – take the time to explain why, in Quebec, the registrar is allowed to refuse a name for a child. It’s not something that I care a lot about – if they changed the law to allow parents to choose anything they want, like in the rest of Canada and in the US, I wouldn’t even blink an eye, but I’m not going to petition a change in the law either – but it does touch on a cultural difference between Quebec and the other Canadian provinces, one that is often misunderstood by people from the rest of Canada – and in this, I include anglophone Quebecers like kung fu lola, who are usually culturally part of the rest of Canada rather than of Quebec’s majority culture --, which creates a lot of misunderstandings between Quebecers and other Canadians, right down to what I believe to be our mostly unearned xenophobic reputation. (And seeing that kung fu lola’s link in post 36 claims that our law is “fascist”, I know that my explanation is desperately needed.)

Basically, and to be very brief, Quebec’s culture, even today, is still more communautarian, more European-like, and more likely to recognize collective rights, while the rest of Canada’s (and of course the US’s) culture is more individualistic. Canada considers that the individual right of the parents to choose their child’s name must be protected, while Quebec thinks that as a society, we have a right and a duty to protect the child from possible ridicule. Similarly, we consider that language laws that slightly curb individual rights are acceptable if they serve a purpose of helping immigrants to integrate in our society and of ensuring the continuation of our culture. This, of course, wouldn’t stand in the rest of Canada. And finally, our attitude towards multiculturalism (to name an issue that is very current in Quebec) is different from the rest of Canada’s. Again, Canada tends to consider individual rights to stand over anything else, while we consider the collective rights of our society to be as or even more important.

I don’t want to pursue this hijack further, and in any case, this is something that I’ve already talked about more than once, and I don’t want to start to bore people. If you Mindfield, or kung fu lola or anyone else would like me to start a thread on the subject, I will, but otherwise I’ll stop, since I’m already talking about Quebec and Canadian society and culture quite often enough on this board.

[matt_mcl]

(Bump! This is okay - it’s not even a month old - right?)

For the foregoing discussion, Quebec takes this approach to names basically because, it being a civil law territory, your name is a matter of public record rather than a private matter, so the government takes an interest in what you name your kid. It’s also correspondingly harder to change your name. (For example, up until Montreuil v. Directeur de l’état civil, you couldn’t change your name to a name of the gender other than your legal gender.)

That said, I’ve spent the afternoon perusing the Alberta birth registry, and here are some of the lowlights. First the boys:

[ul]
[li]. (yes, that is a period. There were sixteen of them.)[/li][li]A.K.I.L. [/li][li]Ace (no, he has to be given this one as a nickname, if you don’t mind)[/li][li]Afasik (even if this is from an ethnicity with a good excuse, someone really should have told them)[/li][li]Aivian[/li][li]Ajustice (this is the term for what the Tories are doing via judicial appointments)[/li][li]Alexx (middle name: I’m going to grow up to be a gay porn star!)[/li][li]Anakin (there were five of these. That’s it, I renounce my membership in the human race.)[/li][li]Anas (a name he can be teased for both in English and Latin – it means duck)[/li][li]Ancient[/li][li]Anderw (dies)[/li][li]Are’s [/li][li]Aryan (there were ten of these. That’s just – I’m not even going to go there.)[/li][li]Atreyu (some pop culture references just aren’t worth the trouble)[/li][li]Chrismark (please choose one or the other)[/li][li]Coy[/li][li]Danielle (years of confusion guaranteed! (Hamish: “His or everyone else’s?”))[/li][li]Darko (see Atreyu)[/li][li]Dax (again, you can be too much of a Star Trek fan. There’s also Daxon, Daxson, and Daxton.)[/li][li]Deacon (Also misspelled five ways.)[/li][li]Deus (oy vey.)[/li][li]Devanté[/li][li]Diezel-Blaze (I know I’m naming my kid after a tractor-trailer accident.)[/li][li]Domanyc[/li][li]DoTayne-Tebekew-Belachew[/li][li]Essay [/li][li]Excell (Do NOT name your kid after a spreadsheet!)[/li][li]Frost[/li][li]Gemini (what do you bet this kid was born in October?)[/li][li]Goy (brother to Aryan)[/li][li]Harsh (testosterone poisoning 101)[/li][li]J (it was funny when President Truman did it. As a middle name. One time.)[/li][li]Jacob-Danny-Micheal (fucking PICK ONE!)[/li][li]JaKob (CamelCaps are no longer required to list yourself in Wikipedia)[/li][li]Kye[/li][li]Kwentyn (42 on the Kinsey scale)[/li][li]LaShay (do NOT name your kid after anything out of the D&D Epic Level Handbook!)[/li][li]Lyth[/li][li]Maxxim (he’s the top, Alexx is the bottom)[/li][li]Neo (see Darko)[/li][li]Nickohlus (if you can’t deal with how the name is spelled, couldn’t you just name the kid something else entirely?)[/li][li]Promise[/li][li]Race (will be beaten up by Aryan)[/li][li]Raistlin (Hamish almost hemorrhaged when we came upon this)[/li][li]Random[/li][li]Riddik (see Neo)[/li][li]Remington (testosterone poisoning 201)[/li][li]Rouge (name your son after cosmetics - no, he won’t get beaten up every day at school, why do you ask?)[/li][li]Rune (see patchouli comment before)[/li][li]Sawyrr (arrest these parents now)[/li][li]Seville[/li][li]Stone (testosterone poisoning 301)[/li][li]Trustin[/li][li]Truth[/li][li]Trux (testosterone poisoning summa cum laude)[/li][li]Xzander, Xzyler, Xzavier (there were two of these! That’s it, we need a tac-nuke strike)[/li][li]Yak[/li][/ul]
If read out loud, this is a passable imitation of Rowan Atkinson’s schoolmaster sketch.

And then the girls:
[ul]
[li]Alyvia[/li][li]Archie (she’ll grow up and date a boy named Betty)[/li][li]Bishop (a blow to sexism in the Catholic Church!)[/li][li]Catience[/li][li]Chanel (as well as Dior - “…Lagerfeld, Givenchy, darling, names, names, names!”)[/li][li]Curtlin-Marie[/li][li]Cydney (Is this supposed to be Sydney or Kidney?)[/li][li]England[/li][li]Fredvieve (middle name: My Parents Wanted a Boy)[/li][li]Gladness[/li][li]Glee[/li][li]J’Lyn (and J’lyn and J’Lynn - so somebody not only made this name the fuck up but invented three different ways to spell it, and gave them to six children - for comparison, only five were named Martina)[/li][li]Justice (great, so what happens when she joins the Supreme Court?)[/li][li]Kaedynce[/li][li]KoJo[/li][li]McCoy (See Dax. Furthermore, why is McCoy a girl’s name and Dax a boy’s name?)[/li][li]Merczaydes[/li][li]Merryum[/li][li]Milliam[/li][li]Mirabel (and her brother, Olympic Stadium)[/li][li]Mýa (yes, that is an acute accent on the Y)[/li][li]Neona (do not name your child for the decor of the establishment in which she was conceived)[/li][li]Nevaeh (Heaven spelled backwards. 65 girls were named this. 25 girls were named Mary.)[/li][li]Niveah (I can’t decide which is the more horrible possibility: that this is the preceding misspelled, or that she was named after the soap)[/li][li]Paridyse[/li][li]Parleen[/li][li]Peaches (<nina simone>My name is Peaches!</nina simone>)[/li][li]Persaeus (this is a mythological name nobody uses, it’s misspelled, and it’s a boy’s name)[/li][li]Piquette[/li][li]Piath[/li][li]Pheonix and Pheonyx (sic and sic - James says, “Is this supposed to be Phoenix or Phonics?”)[/li][li]Poet (will be insufferable during her adolescence)[/li][li]Pope (see Bishop)[/li][li]Prezlie (Oh, good god, I can predict this kid’s entire future)[/li][li]Prissy (please, please tell me this is from some ethnic group that has an excuse for it. Please.)[/li][li]Raegan[/li][li]Raevynn (middle name: When I was born I almost smothered in the patchouli fumes)[/li][li]Reel (dad’s way too into fishing)[/li][li]Rejoice[/li][li]Renee-Jewels[/li][li]Rio[/li][li]Ripley (Oh, why not just name her Sigourney and be done with it)[/li][li]Rogue (Rogue can date Logan, who was among the top ten boy’s names - or for that matter there were two girl Logans as well)[/li][li]Qiana (wasn’t this a brand of artificial fibre they made bad disco shirts out of?)[/li][li]Sawyer (did I mention these were the girls’ names?)[/li][li]Sumr[/li][li]Taeler[/li][li]T’Angeline[/li][li]T’Emimimo[/li][li]Temprance [sic][/li][li]Vy[/li][li]Yar (see McCoy)[/li][li]Zealand[/li][li]Zinnia (either an ugly flower or an evil homewrecker from The Handmaid’s Tale. I immediately looked up the name Offred.)[/li][li]Zowie[/li][li]Zyryll[/li]
[li]and – I swear I am not making these two up and I invite you to look them up if you don’t believe me – Tetlee and Thundra. That’s right, one sounds like She-Ra’s more assertive maiden aunt, and the other is a misspelled brand of tea.[/li]
[li] And MEPHEW!!! For the love of all that is holy, what is that even supposed to be???!!! The sister of Miece?[/li][/ul]

[Taber]

@matt_mcl

Rio

where the parents Duran Duran?

[Risha]

I missed this thread the first time around, but just skimmed it with interest. While I will admit that many of the listed names sound silly to me, I quite like having a unique name. And I’ve never received a single negative comment - most people say something along the lines of “How pretty!” when we are introduced.

I’m white, age 30, by the way. My parents were hippies.

I will say that I’ve never asked my brother Ra or my step-sisters Nashara and Maraya how they feel about theirs.

[Savannah]

@matt_mcl

That said, I’ve spent the afternoon perusing the Alberta birth registry, and here are some of the lowlights.

I’d mock, and mock heartily, but I live in BC, and I would bet ours are even worse.

I used to hate it, but now I am very grateful, mum and dad. I… am…

Elizabeth Jane

Obviously female. Most everyone in North America and the UK are familiar with both names. They’re spelled the traditional way. The Elizabeth portion has a lot of opportunity for varients, if I so choose. The Jane portion is short and easy to spell. (I go by Jane, not Elizabeth.) It won’t look stupid on a gravestone. It wouldn’t sound stupid with a title in front. (Lady Jane? Prime Minister Elizabeth?)

I married a man with a very nice last name, too. (Think, um, Christmas in French.)

All in all, I’m a lucky girl.

[matt_mcl]

@Savannah

I’d mock, and mock heartily, but I live in BC, and I would bet ours are even worse.

I’d just like to make it clear that I’m sure there’s nothing special about Alberta in this regard; I just happened to trip over their lists while exploring certain other weird little interests of mine.

Carry on.

[Savannah]

And that’s aNOTHER thing.

These poor children will never, ever be able to buy personalised pencils or magnets with their names on them.

Won’t someone think of the children?

[blinkingblinking]

I work in a call centre. I have people spelling their names to me all the time, but mostly I do not ask them to. If I have their account number I do not need them to spell their name, just say it.
So I say ‘Could I have your full name please and password ?’
Customer replies with Jayne with a ‘y’ Maddison with a double ‘D’ Symonds with a ‘y’.

I think to myself this person has had to say their name like that 1000s of times. Why do people go for the alternative spellings !

[Spice_Weasel]

If I had been born a boy, my name would have been Orley Richmond Hill IV-- after my father. :eek:

is glad she’s Christina Marie

[sturmhauke]

I used to make more fun of these sorts of names. I still do, a little, but if you go back far enough into ancient history you’ll find that all names are made up. Although I think if you’re going to choose a nonstandard name for your kid, you should at least choose something that has an established meaning in some language instead of pulling letters out of your ass.

[si_blakely]

@Carm6773

… worst names I have encountered this school year:

Justin Tyme

You think that is bad.

I want to know what Mr and Mrs Cox were thinking when they named their son Justin.

Si

[Marlitharn]

In the useless apostrophe department: Nicho’le Renee’.

Why?

[Peanuthead]

@blinkingblinking

Maddison with a double ‘D’

But can she “measure up” to that name?

[Battle_Pope]

[QUOTE=matt_mcl]

[li]Anakin (there were five of these. That’s it, I renounce my membership in the human race.)[/li][/QUOTE]

I’ve posted this before but according to a radio ‘birthday list’ somewhere in my town there are twins languishing under the names of :

Korben and Leeloo

:eek: