I gave one of my kids a VERY unusual name…so unusual, I have only ever seen it one other time (and that was Googling). As far as I’m aware there’s only the two of them in the whole world!!
Nobody has ever given him schtick about his name. I expected a bit of a problem in primary school, but soon realised that little kids don’t give a toss what your name is. Maybe it is our very multicultural society, but apart from names like Dick or Chuck (which would be sure to elicit a giggle or two) I have never heard of any kid getting teased over their name by other kids. Kids have a remarkable ability to pronounce names, even if they can’t spell them
It was always the other parents who would raise their eyebrows and say, “Oh. What an INTERESTING name” with a subtle sneer. Of course, these were almost invariably the parents who called their kids Wayne or Kylie, so my boy never took them seriously anyway!!
He’s always worn his strange name as a badge of honour. And it fits perfectly.
Well, Kambuckta, what? Tell us! Or are you scared?
I’m not out to pit the unusual. Just the clueless, illiterate, and most especially the airy-fairy appropriators with no clue of other people’s cultures. My background is Welsh, in case you hadn’t guessed, hence my initial pick on a pseudo-Welsh name.
Short, simple, pronouncable, no apostrophes, no redundant vowels, no InterCaps.
OK, so it’s not Huw, and maybe some of the other sites would disapprove, but as long as your surname isn’t Wood, you’re OK by me. Not that you have any reason to care for my opinion.
Being Irish, I feel we were entitled to call our daughter Maeve, but even that is anglicised. The original Irish version would be Medb (with a dot over the b for the real purists) or Maedhbh. As we didn’t want her to be covered in saliva for the rest of her life as foreigners tried to get their lips around her name, we went for the dirty stinking filthy English version.
Funnily enough, we Irish don’t get the biggest laugh out of the tortured pseudo-original Irish names given to children the world over. We get a real giggle out of all those ‘Irish’ names that only really exist amongst Irish communities abroad - you’d be very hard pressed to find many Erins, Shannons and Brandons in Ireland.
Ah well, you should be pleased people the world over are proud of their Irish ancestry, not laughing at them. Although the use of place names as Christian names is not restricted to Ireland, they do make pretty names. I know a Shannon and and an Erin, but my youngest son has a genuine Irish name -Fiach. He was named for the hero in this song
I didn’t mean to cause any offence - I suppose the comedy derives from the 90210-type coolness abroad of names that we more readily associate with Irish country places. Fiach is a lovely name and I have been known to give the occasional drunken rendition of ‘Follow me up to Carlow’. Interestingly, the version ‘Fiachra’ is much more common here but I think I prefer the shorter version.
I went to school with a Farquhar, or was it Farquharson. Might even have been something similar as there were several and I might be morphing. Anyway, there are still of lot of those dodgy souding names, well, at least where I grew up. Difficult to pronouces, easy to poke fun at and, I imagine, Norman in orgin – that is Conquest, as opposed to Wisdom.
Kind of like 'em, though. Living history and all that.
Oh, I so totally agree with you on this! Hubby’s brother was, for a time, married to a complete bitch who insisted on having her way about everything! When they had a son she named him Ricky! Not Richard, and call him Ricky. Just Ricky. Sure, it’s fine til he’s about 12, but what kind of a name is Ricky for a man with a serious job? I mean, would you hire an investment banker named Ricky? If you were accused of murder, would you want your defense counsel to be named Ricky? So ridiculous!
Two of my children have very unusual names and while one only ever gets compliments on such a beautiful name, the other is always being asked “what?” espicially when it’s only the written word, not that is a hard word to pronounce but people don’t see it written in the real world. It’s a name from legend. We deliberated long and hard about giving this particular name.
but when a child know it’s name there is nothing in the world to deter them from putting their hands on their hips and screaming to the stupid twat standing in front of them who can’t understand simple english. hehehehehe
My son recently came home with a paper that needed to be signed by me and returned to school. I looked at the name on the paper and it said it was for Khaiyhlyib. I tried pronouncing the name several times and finally my son said “Mommy you mean Caleb!” Makes me glad I named my son Levi, at least it’s short even though most people pronounce it Lev-EE.
I come from a family of unusual names, in the sense that they’re real names, just not ones you come across very often (one of the youngest got Chelsea though, which ended up being pretty popular for a while there so she’s the odd man out). I love my name, and never had any problems from mocking. So when I had my own boys I wanted to also use something not in the top 100. So, of course, the baby’s name (Atticus) does get made fun of on that bad-name site. At least she mocked it in a way that made me laugh out loud.
Out of all the silly naming trends, the one that gets me the most–aside from the idiotic “special spellings”–is the place names. Austin, Dakota, Paris, Sicily, etc. I went to school with a Jamaica, and her boyfriend was always walking around saying "Hey, if you can’t find me later don’t worry. I’ll be in Jamaica. ". Classy, eh?
Something I’ve long wondered: When the various Celtic languages, but especially Welsh, were first written down did the guys who did it have any but the vaguest idea what each letter was supposed to sound like? Were they literate at all or did they make it up as they went along.
