I agree that laughing at a child’s name within earshot is very bad form for the employees, and that posting the boarding pass on line could cause some temporary increase in teasing among her peer group, but I wouldn’t call it Doxing.
The incriminating bit of information that has been revealed about this girl is her name. And that can be connected to this individual by her name. So there isn’t anything being posted that people didn’t know already, except for possibly that she was on flight 6224 on November 2nd.
If anything the parents are guilty of the Streisand effect. By complaining about it to the media they have done much more harm to their child’s reputation than the South West Employee’s initial action.
Certainly the parents should not be surprised people are laughing. What did they think was going to happen? And what did they expect to happen when the kid gets to school?
I can’t believe over 300 sets of parents have done this; the children are innocent, but the parents are a-a-morons.
I was unable to find it by searching, but I swear I remember reading a post here on the dope a few years ago where a poster said she gave her niece a card for her first birthday in which she promised to pay for the niece’s name change when she got old enough to realize how fucking stupid her name was.
Mocking kids for having unusual or “funny” names is just another form of bullying, and everybody should cut it out.
Fortunately, the combination of increasingly multicultural classroom demographics with increasingly “creative” parental naming practices means that eventually everybody’s going to have a “weird” name. Even traditionally conventional anglophone names like “William Smith” and “Mary Brown” are going to seem a bit weird in the sense of old-fashioned.
If you don’t understand how to spell or pronounce somebody’s name, just ask them, and then shut up about it.
I have a friend named Selena. Not a weird name per say, but it kind of is when you take into account that my friend doesn’t have an ounce of Latin blood in her. (She’s white)
Also, deliberately giving your child a “funny” name while knowing that :
a) the child will have to encounter other people in their life; and
b) assholes exist,
is unbelievably stupid bordering on negligent. If you want to make a stand about non-traditional names, change *your *name. Your child is not your stalking horse, your child is not your cute little doll. Your child is a person who is deserving of dignity. And naming them Abcde, or River Rocket Blue Dallas strips them of their dignity just as surely as sending them on their first day of school with a “kick me” sign taped to their back would. The people who actually kick the kid are assholes and bullies. But you shouldn’t have put the sign there.
See, this is another reason it’s dumb to make fun of given names for being “weird”; it so often turns out that the apparent “weirdness” is merely due to one’s own lack of information about the name and its history.
My last name is a common item when not capitalized. We’ve gotten some weird reactiins about it. If it’s mis-spelled by one letter it means a completely other thing. So I know how it feels to be laughed at because your name is strange. I say there’s no reason to add to a child’s burden by labelling them with a crazy name with weird spellings.
I was the only Mark in my classes until high school, although there were a few Marcuses thrown in there.
High school was different; since it was a Catholic school, Mark was one of the more common names, so I went from being unique, to essentially being called by my last name all the time, because “Mark” wasn’t descriptive enough.
Eh, where are we supposed to draw the line between “weird” and merely “unusual” or “traditional”? I went to school with a girl from a devout Jewish family who was named Tzipporah, a perfectly respectable and honorable Biblical name. Did she get called “Zippy” and so on at school? Yes, she did.
Were the parents irresponsibly “stripping her of her dignity” by giving her that name? What other traditional names of various religions and cultures are you going to decree that parents “shouldn’t” give their children because they’re “undignified”?
Let’s focus on shutting down the assholes and bullies who think that mocking a kid’s name is an acceptable form of humor, instead of policing parents’ naming choices.
Nope, not an urban legend. Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva are Zappa’s kids. I personally would love to be named Moon Unit, but that’s just me. Better that than “creative spelling” like Jaxon or Micheal or something.
There is a huge difference between “traditional” and “just plain weird.” More to the point, the people being mocked are mostly (and should be) the idiot parents.
And (too slow on the edit) yes, making fun of a kid’s name is rude (tho I would not call it “bullying”) but I think it would be good to help kids develop a sense of humor so they can laugh off such rudeness. My college roommate had a last name that could be easily turned into Dracula and she said her reply was always “Careful or I’ll drink your blooood.”
Where are you drawing that line? Thousands of names that are routinely accepted as “traditional” in one cultural subgroup look “just plain weird” to members of another.
“Abcde” isn’t a traditional name. It is an act of cruelty by the parents. There is no way to defend that name choice by calling it “a traditional name of our culture” unless your culture is “dumbass.”
Face it, “Dweezil” will never make it as a middle manager in Omaha.
Non-Latina women have been using the given name “Selena” for decades if not centuries. See, e.g.: 