Hi, I'd like you to meet my son. His name is Blayde.

Apparently children's names are getting even more ridiculous than I had thought. Here's an article from Deadspin about how American baby names are getting worse.

Link

Focus: Discuss these terrible names, or any names not on the list that you've come across in person.

Alt-focus: Discuss where you got your name from if you know why. For me, my name is a family name. Going back four generations, we have all had the same first name. Our middle names are all different, though.

 

I was (and am) a middle name kid. My parents decided making my first name my great grandmother's last name wasn't bad enough so they had to saddle me with my mother's last name as a middle name and then call me that. So I have three last names as my full name. Try explaining that on the playground. I am confident no one in the world has the same name I have and they did it without naming me Xerox, so I'll give them that.

We used family names for our three, but stuck with Robert Charles, and Catherine and call them by those full names so we don't have a Bob, Chuck, Cathy, or God forbid, a Cat in the family.

The fun aside is when we were looking for names for Catherine Mrs. Noland's mother sent us her family tree going back 10 or 12 generations and mixed in with all of the Ezekiels, Jebediahs, and Obadiahs was a woman with the first name of Submit. You read that right. Some asshole decided to name his daughter Submit.

 

A list I've compiled elsewhere on this board, but here a few highlights:

A girl I met in university: Ramdeep Khakh.
Another girl from university (her dad was the head of campus police): Marsha Mallo.
The daughter of a friend of mine: Anallyse.
The daughter of another friend of mine: Abby-gayyle.

Fuck off, people. Your kids should be unique and precious snowflakes because of their personalities, not because their name has three "y"s.

Edit: Oh, my name. My name is Tara, named for a Hill near where my dad's family grew up in Ireland. Upon said hill rests a stone. Not just any old stone, mind you. A stone of destiny.

Spoiler

It looks like a dick.

I should thank my lucky stars, though. For some reason, had it not been for the intervention of my benevolent aunt, my mom wanted to name me Paula-Jo. Fuck sakes.

 

I knew a guy in school called Dirk. Personally, I've joked about naming my firstborn son Wally. My last name also begins with W. Rolls off the tongue nicely, but I'm sure he'd cop a lot of shit because of it through school and hate me forever.

My middle name is Francis, which I'm not really fond of, but it was after a great grandfather who fought in the first World War, so I guess that's a good enough reason. He was probably a nurse.

 

My drug dealing, get high off your own supply, born too late and the wrong color to really be hippy parents decided that if I was a girl I was to be named Rasin-Carmel. Good job setting me up to be a pole dancer you fucks. No idea why they thought this was a good move. I thank whatever god there is for my cock every goddamned day.

 

I've mentioned it before, but at an old job, I had an email correspondence with one "Moonlit Wang." She was a Harvard student so I guess she must have done OK in the end, but still...

 

Audio NSFW . . .

 

My parents gave me and my brothers all names that start with "J." Of course this led to a lot of confusion growing up. When my dad got mad, he'd forget our names and just start calling us by numbers. "God damn it, where is J... J... Number 2!"

We named our daughter Giulia (pronounced Julia, spelled the Italian way). It's somewhat unique (we know two people with the name spelled that way), but not too crazy. My wife got the name from a good friend she had in college, and she just liked it. We have a boy name, too. He'll be named after my wife's little brother that passed away a few years ago. If we have another girl, I'm pushing for Lisa, mainly out of my love for The Simpsons.

 

I work in a pharmacy and we fill about 600 prescriptions a day. I would guess at least half of those are billed to white trash, Title XIX (state aid) patients. I think I would exceed the character limit on this post if I tried to list all of the stupid names I see. Off the top of my head from just last Friday (because I wrote these down and am considering keeping a list somewhere online):

Ricky Hard, Rider Heiter, and Hoa Tran (all aboard). A couple of siblings that stick in my mind: Kyran and Kyree & Alexander and Alexanderia. We have also filled a prescription for Viagra for Richard Johnson (true).

 

My actual name is Eduardo Antonio, Eduardo being a family name (I'm the third one) and Antonio was my grandpa on my mom's side. If I had a child and it was a boy I guess I'd toy with the idea of keeping the streak going for a fourth generation. Although it was kinda of annoying when my mom would yell for one of us and we didn't know which one. Hell, I remember a long time ago me and my dad took the same college class. That led to the teacher looking over the student list thinking that there was some kind of clerical error. Nope.

 

My first name is a concession between my parents. My Dad wanted to name Jacob and my Mom wanted name me Dylan. Neither liked the other. My dad tossed out the idea of Anderson, which is my Mom's maiden name, but being the mid 80s, my Mom was worried that I would get called Andy, which she didn't like. Retrospectively, its a bit of a bummer cause Anderson is kind of a baller name and would flow really nice with my last name. When my parents named me, they only knew 1 other kid with my name, then within 5 years it had become a hot name and they popped up all over. But its died down a bit now.

My middle name is Thomas, named after my alcoholic grandfather, FAAAANNNTASTIC. It was a last ditch attempt by my Mom to encourage my grandfather to shape up, for my sake, but he's a worthless POS, so it didnt work. Oh well.

For my future children, I definitely want different sort of names. Not ridiculous names like Coriander or Zeus, but one of my great great grandfathers was Karsten, which I always liked. My 3 little sisters all have names that can go either boy or girl, which is kind of cool. Especially since it was before the trend of taking a guy's name, adding a bullshit Y or Z instead of an A, I, or S and making it a girl's name.

 

Sorry to say, I think it's been done before:

 

Next time on Blossom (Six was her name)...

In the same vein as FreeCorps, I agree that I've toyed around with the idea of, if I have a son, naming him the same as me to carry on with the legacy. However, as he also said, having my mother yell my father and my first name and not knowing who she was mad at has always been a pain in the ass.

 

This is hilarious because my cousin's first name actually is Blade. He has two older sisters, Tracy and Regan, and a younger sister named Mary. Both of his parents are well-educuted successful people, and he and all of his sisters are normal people, so I don't know. I think I once asked my uncle why they named him Blade, but I don't remember the answer.

I will say though that all these unique names, stupid as they may sound, are a lot better than the alternative. I sometimes have to work with datasets of my clinic's patient base, 85% of whom are Somali. Do you know what a pain in the ass it is to try to get descrete datum when there are at least one hundred different Mohamed Mohameds in the patient lists? It's a nightmare. We have probably 15,000 or so unique Somali patients, and I swear every one of them is named Mohamed, Ahmed, Ismail, Abdi, or Hassan. I'd rejoice if everyone had a super unique name, even if they were a dumb as the ones listed in the article.

My first name is pretty unique - Luciano. It means "Man of Light", which is pretty awsome sounding, and the only two other people I've heard of who had my name are one of the most famous opera singers of all time and probably the 2nd most famous mobster in history. Not a bad set of associations, in my opinion.

 

The wife and I tossed around the idea of naming our kids after cheese.

On Saturday we could pile little Brie, Gouda, and Jack into the minivan for a trip to the zoo. Then on Monday head over to the Board of Ed. to register the twins, Camembert and Gorgonzola, (Bert and Zola for short) for school in the fall.

But in the end, we stuck with something a little more conventional though. And it was good thing, because we only had one kid. The theme names work better in groups.

 

The stupidest names I have heard recently are:

Boys - Alpacino: You really have to love his work to do this to your spawn.

Girls - Felonie: Talk about setting your child up for failure.

 

My middle name is from my great-grandmother, Molly. I like the idea of using the middle name for some kind of family legacy, but I don't know which name I'd use. All of the names I know from my dad's side are super old-fashioned - my grandparents were Julius and May, and my aunt is Merle - and not only am I not close enough with anyone from my mom's side to use one of their names, but their names are all pretty boring. I think my parents just pulled my first name out of nowhere just because they liked it. It's pretty rare and is from a completely different culture than ours. The worst things about it (besides people spelling it wrong all the time) is that it is most commonly associated with frozen pizza, when I'd much rather people react with "Oh, like the queen from Babar?" But, no.

My favorite naming trend is when I hear people named after alcohol. My cousin's full name is Marsala, but is known as Marsy. The owners of one of the dance studios I used to be a part of had a baby and named her Remy. Just last week I was in the break room at work and overheard a coworker talking to her sister, Hennessy. I just assume that's what their parents were drunk off of when they were conceived.

And then there's my friend, the older of two sisters that I'm friends with from home - two Amazonian blondes from the most hippie-iest family I know, who eat all organic and do homeopathy and remedies and their parents' home smells like patchouli -whose name is Shaniqua. She goes by Shani, but I find it necessary to call her Shaniqua whenever I can.

 

I used to teach swim lessons and the biggest name variation was Jayda, Jaida, Jaiden, Jaidan, Jayden, Jaden etc. And good luck figuring out if they were boys or girls when you first got the list. We named our oldest Morgan, which if I had to do over I'd pick something more traditional as it was a trendy name at the time and there are tons of Morgans her age. We went more traditional with the other two--Catherine and Patrick. My son's middle name is Allen, which is a tradition as it's my husband's middle name, and his dad's, going back about 4 generations.

When my in-laws were picking a name for my husband, my father-in-law liked Jeff, but that was too plain for his mom, so she agreed on the condition they spell it the English way--Geoffrey. You would be surprised at how many people do not know how to pronounce that name. We get phone calls for Ge-offrey (hard G) to which I reply, "there's no one here by that name" as they obviously don't know him.

 

Actual phone conversation I had with my credit card company awhile back:

Company rep (female): Hello, this is Chamer ( pronounced sha-meer), how are you doing today?

Me: Wait, what did you say your name was?

Rep: Chamer.

Me: How do you spell that?

Rep: C-H-A-M-E-R.

Me: You're black, aren't you?

Rep: Yes, how did you know?

Me: Just a guess...

Another time I got a call from a credit card rep named Apple. I shit you not, just like the fruit. I asked her if she had a sister named Banana. She didn't think that was as funny as I did.
My cousin in law just named his baby girl Amberlynn.
A guy I met recently has a daughter named Gitaly (jee-tah-lee). He seemed proud of the fact that he and his wife made up the name.
I used to work with a guy who had a son named Reyvyn (raven), proving that this phenomenon isn't limited to girls.