Worst I’ve seen: Shithead
Pronounced: Shih-theed
Spelled: Shit head
You can tell they made up that second name by looking for random objects in the room lol
I know if a person whose legal first and middle name is margarita corona
So many people don’t understand that children are people and people have rights. You are responsible for your children, you don’t own them. If you don’t like that, simply don’t have kids.
To the people downvoting this, you are the problem.
Children are people, not your property. You owe your kids a loving, caring, and supportive environment because it was your choice to have them. They did not choose to be born, they did not choose you as parents, they do not owe you anything. If you treat them well, they will support you and love you. If they do not, then you did something wrong.
If you think your children owe you anything, don’t have kids and go see a therapist.
I think they are downvoting because of the implication that having a not-cringy legal name is a legal right. In almost all places, it isn’t. The general sentiment of the comment is correct - you shouldn’t do stupid bullshit to your kids for your own amusement. But saying it is a “right” is incorrect in a very weird way.
At my job, I come across a lot of children’s names. So many, that I can actually sympathize with parents who want an odd name. Names are supposed to be a unique identifier, so if you wanna name a kid “Revolution Fighter” or “Czarlanda,” I get it. I can certainly find a kid with that name in our databases faster than I can find a “John Anderson” or an “Adam Wu.”
What really kills me is parents who name their kids a normal sounding name, but with an insane spelling. I’m talking like “Shelley” spelled “Schelei” or “Alexander” spelled “Alexzander.” You’re not being clever or cute, you’re just going to make your child’s life unnecessarily harder as they have to spell their name out every. single. time.
I read this a while ago (scroll down into section II for the graphs) which conducted a survey to see how happy people were with their names. The consensus seems to be that, for the most part, people just want names that don’t annoy them constantly. Very common names rank lower than less common names, until the names become very uncommon. More normal or traditional names rank higher than more modern or creative names.
The conclusion I drew was that people want a normal name spelled a normal way, that is not too common. Why? Because if your name is too common, you are always confused with other people (cue saying “Michael” in a crowded room and having 5 people turn towards you). But if your name is too uncommon, people will constantly mis-spell and mispronounce it, so you will constantly either be correcting people or having to ignore it. If you have a common name with a unique spelling, then people will always misspell your name unless you spell it out for them. And of course, if you are named after a sci fi character or a name that rhymes with your twin, you will probably be bullied for it in middle school.
So if you are naming a kid, your best bet is to look through the current common baby names and pick one somewhere between 100 and 1000 most popular, after eliminating weird spellings or names that can easily be turned into mean nicknames. Bonus points if you can tie the name into your cultural heritage or you have an admirable anscestor to name your kid after.
We still have about 5 years before the first wave of incorrectly-spelled Khaleesis start showing up at county courthouses en masse.
What is the correct spelling? Is that even a name?
That spelling of Alexzander a lot of times comes from non American countries (maybe Czech? Unsure)
Look at Alex Lifesons real name lol. I cant spell it
Not actually why they did it. I can quote the parent here, because for some reason they felt the need to immediately justify the spelling. “I just thought it’d be cool to do something different.”
name out every. single. time.
“Czarlanda,” I get it. I
Names aren’t supposed to be unique. Your whole name doesn’t even need to be unique. And when you adda middle-name or two, no matter what basic ass names you’ve chosen it’s gonna be unlikely that anyone within reasonable distance would be named exactly the same.
Thank God my country has a law preventing this type of child abuse
I wish I was named kitchenaid whiskey jones
Please don’t give your kid a boring name.
Please do. They can then pick a super cool nickname themselves later in life
You don’t get to pick your nickname.
Sure, Zarkanian
I attended my kids award ceremony (he’s 10) and there were multiple girls ages 11 and 12 called Khaleesi and I shook my head
I get naming your kid after a cultural figure, but it drives me nuts that so many people believe her name is khaleesi.
Plenty of people might actually think that, but Prince, Queen, Princess, and different variations in different languages are common enough names already. It’s possible plenty to most of those people just like the title and know it’s not her actual name. Not directed at you, just some people might not realize that the phenomenon was popular before GoT existed.
Particularly when the spelling of Daenerys already had a major “millennial parent” aesthetic.
One of my favorite court transcripts is Sheppard v. Speir.
The Court: All right. Now, do you have some objection to him being renamed Samuel Charles?
Sheppard: Yes.
The Court: Why? You think it’s better for his name to be Weather’by Dot Com Chanel-
Sheppard: Well, the-
The Court: Just a minute for the record.
Sheppard: Sorry.
The Court: Chanel Fourcast, spelled F-o-u-r-c-a-s-t? And in response to that question, I want you to think about what he’s going to be-what his life is going to be like when he enters the first grade and has to fill out all [the] paperwork where you fill out-this little kid fills out his last name and his first name and his middle name, okay? So I just want-if your answer to that is yes, you think his name is better today than it would be with Samuel Charles, as his father would like to name him and why. Go ahead.
Sheppard: Yes, I think it’s better this way.
Read the whole thing. That was wild. I think, alone, Weatherby (said together) isn’t the worst name I’ve ever heard but all the rest is cuckoo banana pants. Based on what came out of the court proceedings that woman had some PROBLEMS.
That was a wild read, thanks for sharing. I’m so glad the kid had a father that cared, and that he got the custody and succeeded in changing that name!
I know someone with relatives in China where they gave their kids nicknames that roughly translate to “first baby”, “second baby”, etc. They’re all middle aged adults now and they’re still addressed by the same nicknames. So you have kids listening to their grandparents talk about “second baby” and imagining a baby, but then you meet them and it’s an old man.
A number of traditional names the world over are literally “first son”, etc. Not to mention all the names that mean “so-and-so got me pregnant with this one.” Normal names are only normal because we’re used to them, not because they aren’t made-up bullshit.
70% of the names have a meaning usually, at least the most used names in Italy have a meaning in a way or another, so i suppose it’s the same for all the countries
I think people in English have lost the connection between their name and its original meaning. No one thinks about the fact that naming your kid “Peter” is the same as naming him “Rock”, or that a brook(e) is a little river.
I think it’s for all languages, if the name is not very similiar or the same to the original word or meaning it’s hard for someone to make a connection. So yeah, i agree
We don’t teach meaning of names anymore that’s the big one. My coworker just had a kid and ran a list of like 5 names past me. When I pointed out what each one means and their origin he firmly threw all of them out the window and was horrified.
It was mostly random bullshit names with weird spellings.
He ended up naming his kid Herma. Which he claimed sounded nice, when I asked him if he knew what the word ment he said no.
His new daughter has a very unfortunate name.
His kid but like man… That’s goanna suck later in life.
In my family (and some friends families too) sometimes we came up with a name and think about the meaning of that meaning too, idk how much common is it tbh.
I think it really depend on the culture
Is it not just feminine of Herman? Nothing comes up on Wiktionary.
Hm…I don’t know. I think terrible names are popular enough presently that when the generation being born right now is school-aged, a McKeinsleigh will probably need to use a last initial in class to not get her confused with the other one(s).
Very much this. The people who make these kinds of posts forget that this is how names are invented and evolved.
People who complain about what can be termed “Tragedeigh” names seem to be fine with “Kayleigh” and “Ashleigh”, despite both being a later variation on “Kayley” and “Ashley”, with the former not becoming popular until the 80s - and because of a song, at that.
In general, people have a very hard time with the idea that language in general, and names specifically, evolve over time. Whatever was commonplace until they reach, say, their 30s is what’s “right”. Any variation after that is “wrong”. When, of course, it was just as mutable when they were young and before they were born, but they weren’t around for the latter and were equally mutable when they were themselves young.
There can often be an unpleasant class/race undertone to it as well.
Expect those examples you gave appeared due to mixing of standard phonetics of different languages. They where two normal things spelled correctly pushed together.
That’s where the VAST majority of change in language and names comes from. Spellings, or sounds picked up from other languages due to mixed language or dialect households.
So even the new spelling is still normal by the standards of the environment it came from.
Many of the recent nonsense names are entirely abnormal in their origin. Having no root in language, dialect, religion, history or culture.
They are entirely bullshit made up nonsense. Which is NOT normal historically. Even naming after a video game character with a weird name is more normal than what’s been happening.
What’s not standard about the phonetics of Emmaleigh? Or Graycyn, for that matter, to go with the example in the screnshot?
“Gray” is a word, and even an extant first name (Gray Davis, for example, or Gray O‘Brien). “Cyn” is a common syllable, like in “cynic”, but it’s also a name itself - it’s a common nickname to shorten “Cyndy” or “Cyntha” (eg Madame Cyn or Cyn Santana).
You’re fine with Graycyn, right?
people have a very hard time with the idea that language in general […] evolve[s] over time
Writing is not language. Speaking is language (edit: in this particular case), and there’s no phonetic change here. If a spelling is due to another language that the parents, or really anyone, speak, that’s fine. But if your language (read: English) has such a terrible spelling system that people can do these things completely arbitrarily and the spelling is still somewhat readable, there’s something wrong with that writing system (not with the people!)
Writing is absolutely part of language. If your point is that English has weird, illogical spelling rules, then you’re right. That’s not a new observation. People have been writing about that since spelling was standardised.
And it’s been changing for a very long time.
How do you feel when you see the name “Amy”. Do you dislike it? What if I told you that the original spelling in English was “Aimee”? “Amee” was also very common once upon a time. “Amy” was a much later spelling and was once considered a cringey, trendy “Tragedeigh”. As, as I said above, were Ashleigh & Kayleigh.
But you don’t think of them that way, because they’re now common. “Kayleigh” only gained popularity 40 years ago. “Ashleigh” is less than 100 years old. And already people don’t bat an eye at it. But they will at “Emmaleigh”, even though it’s exactly the same evolution.
I don’t have a problem with language and names evolving, I have a problem with them evolving into something dumb.
What is or is not considered dumb in any particular culture is normally nothing more than a function of the age of that thing.
For example, Wendy is just considered a normal name today, but people were mocked for calling their daughters Wendy once upon a time. It was invented for the book Peter Pan and was derived from a child referring to their friend as their “Fwendy”.
Vanessa was once considered a stupid, trendy, quirky name, being another one taken from literature.
Cheryl - a combination of Cherie and Beryl. Melinda - a combination a Mel and Linda. Annabelle - a combination of Anna and Belle. Annabeth - guess what that’s a combination of?
All of those got the same push-back for being stupid and contrived. Yet now they’re just…names.
Give it 50 years and people called Khaleesi and Katniss will be talking about how stupid all these new names are, rather than sensible ones like thiers.
Henry: Come on, Junior.
IndianaKWJ: Will you please stop calling me Junior?
Sallah: Please, what does this mean? Always with this… Junior?
Henry: That’s his name: Henry Jones, Junior.IndianaKWJ: I like… KitchenAid Whisky Jones.Henry: We named the dog KITCHENAID WHISKY JONES.
Dr. Marijuana Pepsi wrote a whole thesis on unique names.
Cannabis Coke is way more badass
Jazz Cabbage RCCola was a great tambourine player tho
Ganja Moxie is still looking for direction in life.
But she dropped out of grad school for some reason.
It says in her Wikipedia article that she completed her PhD.
She realized she could make more money dancing.
Must’ve cracked
And on Wikipedia you can read about Marijuana’s farm.
When choosing my son’s name I had two rules:
- No super popular top 10 or 20 name. There were plenty of very popular choices that I liked as names. But, I figured let’s try to find something at least a little unique for various reasons.
However!
- They shall not need to spell their name every time they tell it to somebody. This implies a few things, like choosing an established first name people have heard before rather than making something up, and using the common spelling of that name.
I had a very similar strategy, except I was trying to avoid top 50. I once told a stranger my kid’s name and they said “I like it. Unique, but not weird”. That comment made me so happy!
This seems rational and thoughtful.
Thanks! That’s usually what I’m going for.
