I have no room to talk, mind you, since some of my kids are named Griffin, Scout, Scarlett, Jett, and Django. And we live in Colorado, so “hippy” names are endemic.
All that said, there are sisters on my daughter’s soccer team named “Meadow” and “Lark”–c’mon man!
There is a female YouTuber named Kalel.
Just remembered another weird one. Reruhi Shimizu is the name of the local kid who won a bronze ski jumping medal for Japan in the Sochi Olympics. The name “Reruhi” is the Japanese rendition of the German surname “Lerch.”
Why would his parents give him such a weird name? Apparently to guide him to his destiny: He was named after Theodor Edler von Lerch, the Austrian military officer who introduced skiing to Japan about 100 years ago.
Either there’s more than one girl named Mikel, or we have met. :rolleyes:
Confession time :o
My daughter IS named Precious.
She is adopted and was named that because her birthmother called her that before birth. She is actually addressed by one of her middle names. The LOTR connection was never even thought of, at the time.
Regrettably, it slid past us at the time that passports and driver’s licenses use the literal name on the birth certificate. :smack: She was not real pleased when she took driver’s ed.
We intend to do a name change to reverse the order of her names as soon as we can.
“No worries” – it’s a frequently-chosen female given name, over quite large areas of the globe where Tolkien-fandom is not prominent. The issue is one for Tolkien nerds like me – not for girls who are named Precious – to deal with.
Not precisely to the point of this thread, but I have 5 cousins, all with the same initials (at least when named; some are female). The names themselves are not that far out, but…
For that matter, my own middle name is a variant spelling of a more common name - which I think might actually be the original spelling, since it makes sense in slightly fractured Latin.
Some may recall a Johnny Cash hit about a kid with an unusual name - when my wife and I moved out West we promptly encountered a boy named Dakota. Having had an interest in Native Americans, this struck me as humorous - Yeah, to me he was a boy named Sioux, sort of. 
My grandmother went to school with a girl whose name is often found in lists of odd names. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Titty really did name their daughter Ophelia. :eek:
Weird and pretentious names in fiction, as opposed to the real world (though fanatical Harry Potter devotees might quarrel with me there) – per the various commentaries / marginalia by J.K. Rowling on her “Potterverse”: a fair spell of time after the action of the Harry Potter novels, Luna Lovegood – the lovably and dreamily weird “crypto-naturalist” in the books – very suitably marries Rolf Scamander, a descendant of the crypto-naturalist doyen Newt Scamander. In time, the couple have twin boys, whom they call Lorcan and Lysander.
One suspects (with much confirmation from the books) that kids in the wizarding world are as pettily nasty, as their Muggle equivalents: so a boy with the name Lysander Scamander, would likely be mercilessly ridiculed for it. Not a good name-choice. Unless – Luna seems characteristically to do things upside-down-and-back-to-front vis-a-vis everybody else – she might well have insisted that her husband take her surname, instead of the other way round. Lorcan and Lysander Lovegood, sound definitely cool.
Getting over some shyness, I asked a clerk in a sandwich shop her name. I replied and all was fine, but it would be hard using her name, “Pet”, in conversation.
We had a coworker who returned from Africa. He said his name was met with smiles and politely suppressed laughter. I had never thought of his name that way. But imagine introducing yourself - “Hi, I’m Randy.”
I heard the hopefully apocryphal tale of the girl who grew up and became a stripper named “Debris”.
Speaking of strippers, the son of a friend of mine married one who had had her first name legally changed to Bambi. This was in Florida around 1980.
The granddaughter of a friend of mine has a friend who’s name is Tannery. I find that name terribly unattractive. Didn’t her parents know that a tannery is a place where animal hides are processed and are generally not pleasant places to be? Too bad Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs” wasn’t around 24 or so years ago. Seeing the episode where he’s working in one might have averted this travesty.
Hispanics come in all colors, including Han, black, blue-eyed blonde… Hispanic does not equal mestizo. Hispanic and white are not different “nations”.
I went to elementary school with a Summer Meadows.
My favorite still is Playon Infamous-Pimpin. (First and middle). A friend does work for the state and came across his file. I’ve seen the proof (scrubbed of important info) (and he’s old enough now that a web search will find him).
Oh, yeah, a couple of years ago I read a brief article about a pair of [del]redneck hicks[/del] very nice folks who named their son ESPN. (Pronounced “ESS-pehn.”)
My wife used to work with a woman named “Kirk”. Kirk’s sisters were named “Bryan” and “Kevin”. These are white women now in their mid 60s born to otherwise ordinary multi-generation USA-ians with professional degrees & high end jobs. Pretty much the opposite of the sort of folks you’d stereotypically expect to do something like this to their daughters. It seemed to us they must have really, really, *really *wanted boys instead.
And yes, all three sisters were pretty weird.
I’ve gotten to the point where the unusual names don’t bother me as much as the unusual spellings. There are often many variations of common names; it isn’t necessary to complicate spelling further. My other pet peeve is punctuation in the middle of names although I will withdraw my objection if somebody points out a culture where names with apostrophes are traditional.
Personally I like the first names of the Hogg twins…
Ima and Ura
That’s partly a myth: “Hogg is often remembered for naming his daughter Ima Hogg, an odd name which derived from a poem written by James’ brother, Thomas Elisha Hogg. The story that she had a sister named ‘Ura’ is an urban legend.”
We had an American in our social circle whose name was Randall. When he was introduced to people, he would quickly make a joke about it, so that he could get in first with the obvious lines. (In case anyone doesn’t know, randy = horny in the UK and Australia)
I met a couple when I was in Fiji a few decades ago. His name was Randy, hers was Candy. Yes, I did have a bit of fun with that combination.