If I ever have a son I’m going to name him Zeus.
They’ll be use to it by then, I’m quite sure.
As the father of Tiffany and Brittany, I take umbrage with your statement.
And if you have an issue with the name Stephanie, I’m going to have to hunt you down and manually adjust your attitude.
One middle name around here is Apollo… 
Maybe the plethora of such names eases the situation a bit, but I have to say these and names like them - Crystal comes to mind - saddle a woman with a terminal case of never being able to be taken seriously. I know adults with all three that have changed their names, usually to the boring “it was my grandmother’s name” middle name in order to compete for jobs, promotions, etc.
I really think it’s cruel to give children cute widdle names they’ll have to contend with as a 30yo rising professional. Ditto for bizarre spellings that might look good in prison tats but like hell on an executive office door.
My husband and I have an ongoing joke about the stupid yewnique names that middle class suburbanite white Gen Xers give their kids. When we see toddlers in public being annoying, we whisper to eachother what their name might be. We guess possible names like Palin, Gryler, Quinoa, Blayden, Grayden, Maydenne, Kevlar, Bucket, Pointer…you get the idea.
It’s become shorthand between us. We know not to eat at certain restaurants at certain times because it’s bound to be a “Gryler-fest”, and maybe we should hold off until later. One of these days somebody’s going to actually name their kid “Gryler” and I’m going to laugh my ass off.
New Zealand prohibits names which “might cause offence to a reasonable person; or […] is unreasonably long; or without adequate justification, […] is, includes, or resembles, an official title or rank.”
In Sweden, first names “shall not be approved if they can cause offense or can be supposed to cause discomfort for the one using it, or names which for some obvious reason are not suitable as a first name.”
Which didn’t stop a Swedish couple in 1991 from trying to name their kid “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116” (pronounced “Albin”). They didn’t get away with it, though.
Other countries make you pick from a list of allowed names, which does seem slightly crazy to me. However, I’m all for not allowing a parent to name their kid something so dumb that it basically amounts to child abuse. If you want to ban the use of “Anal” or “Lucifer” as first names, that a-okay with me.
Hmmm, if you Google it, a lot of people think that former teenybopper names like Tiffany and Brittany are now stripper names. Heh.
One of my dad’s colleagues had sons named Thor, Sigurd & Tyr. Their sister Erin felt wildly cheated.
Agreed on all counts.
(P.S. I don’t have a problem with Stephanie, which of course long predated the cutesy trend. However, one of my clients is named Stephenie, and I have to wonder if her parents thought they were being clever…or simply couldn’t spell.)
These are the people I don’t understand. Usually I start the whole “Throatwarbler mangrove” sketch by Monty Python from memory and they either get angry or walk away before I can finish. 
My eighth-grade daughter has classmates named:
Staija
Plez
Cianni
Theori (thee-OR-ee)
Liyah (Leah, in normal-people spelling)
Ungodly numbers of Jaden/Cayden/Braylens with every Yew-nique spelling variant you can imagine.
Ditto McKenzie/McKenna/Mc-everythings.
Cheznie
Tysauni
Emaje
etc.
I almost feel bad for the poor little Eugenias, Seths, and Christophers!
We had an ugly cat one time and to keep from forming any real attachment to it, I named it Blotharta. It worked.
If I ever have a son I’m going to name him “Dad”.
Nitpick: Throatwobbler mangrove. The SDMB brought that to my attention a while back. It’s sort of hard to distinguish in the British accent.
There’s a football announcer named Ian Eagle, but he pronounces it Eye-An. I kept thinking it should be “I’m An Eagle”, which is at least grammatical. What does he do if he’s announcing a Philadelphia game?
Creative misspellings like former celebrity glutton Rachael [sic] Ray are bad enough, but now we need creative mispronunciations too? Bah, humbug!
I got a kick out of this list of names: http://www.amasupercross.com/rules/pdf/2014/Bulletins/AMA%20SXMX%20Numbers%202014%20FINAL.pdf
100 young men, mostly white, mostly American. Not a single “John”. Only one “Mike”.
You guys might be interested in the Baby Name Wizard Blog. I don’t have any kids currently, nor any on the near horizon, but I follow this blog because it’s fascinating. She discusses trends in baby naming, and what these trends say about our society.
For example, in this week’s entry, she points out that the eleventh-fastest-rising girl’s name in England for 2013 was “Khaleesi.” From, yes, Game of Thrones.
Meh. Naming trends change. I’m sure my great grandparents complained about all the Shirleys and Barbaras, wondering what is wrong with classic names like Gertrude and Myrtle.
As someone who recently named a baby (an awesome name), I am sick to death of the stupid competition to find a name that is juuuuuuuuust on the bleeding edge of “classic and old-fashioned” and “popular and overplayed.” It’s like a perpetual race to name you kid whatever is on spot 150 of the social security register, so you can revel in your genius at finding that single name that is “old fashioned but unique.”
Just name your kid what you and your spouse can agree on. We’ve had a Secretary of State named Condoleeza (OMG they’ll know she’s black!) and Hilary (which was at the time a pretentious surname-as-given-name.) I suspect that people with names you are not familiar with will survive without your heartfelt concern.
She doesn’t write Twilight novels, does she?
Because some parents call their kids “Satan”, or “Shitstain”, or "… you get the picture. Why should the kids suffer with that?
Hank Ketcham, cartoonist of Dennis The Menace fame, did a story arc about 40-some years ago, in which he examined the arbitrariness of given names.
Dennis found and adopted a stray cat, which he named Hotdog.
The story arcs then followed his attempts to convince, often requiring some substantial effort, all the other characters in the strip that Hotdog is as perfectly cromulent a name as any other, for a cat to have.
There’s a family member named Xcel.