Posted on 02/04/2003 1:46:56 PM PST by Jimmyclyde
Jamie Oliver, also known as "The Naked Chef," just named his daughter Poppy Honey. My Sons a Fruit Parents Are Giving Kids Strange Names
By Buck Wolf
April 2 My son is a fruit. My daughter's a tart. And if you think that's cheesy, tell it to my nephew, Gouda.
Some parents are apparently naming their children after returning from the supermarket. Among the 200,000 who have signed up at Global Name Registry the company in charge of handling registrations for the new Internet domain extension ".name" are people with first names such as "Gouda," "Almond," "Cappuccino," "Veal," and "Bologna." Topping this trend is Jamie Oliver, better known on TV as "The Naked Chef." His wife Jools gave birth March 18 in London to a 7-pound, 14-ounce girl named Poppy Honey.
My Name Is Canon, as in Camera
It's tempting to think "Cappuccino" and other names are fabricated. However, the dot-name domain requires registrants prove their identities. And an expert who analyzes census and Social Security Administration records is not surprised such names exist.
"Anything is possible, when you consider that last year alone, 298 girls were named Armani and another 10 boys were named Halston," says Cleveland Evans of Bellevue University.
"Every year, the list gets stranger and stranger. It's as if parents think they're guilty of abuse if there is another kid in the classroom with the same name as theirs."
About 2 million boys and 2 million girls were born in the United States in 2000, the last complete year for which records are available. The Social Security Administration reports that 33,957 boys were named Jacob and 25,714 girls were named Emily, making them the most common baby names for the year.
But the number of strange names on the Social Security Administration's list is getting longer. There were 17 boys named Ventura (as in Jesse), six boys named Timberland (as in the boot), 49 named Canon (spelled like the camera), and 27 Blue (as in little boy).
The girls' names were equally bizarre. Thirty-five were named Vanity. Another 29 were named Whisper, while 54 sported the name Sincere. And 24 were positively Unique.
Imagine two mothers meeting in a mall: "Hi," one says. "This is my daughter, Unique."
"Well," says the other mother, her competitive fire sparked, "my daughter is also Unique."
Birth Certificates Need Spell Checkers
The strangest names aren't even on the list. The Social Security Administration only releases names chosen five or more times, in order to protect the privacy of parents with bad judgment.
You have to worry about the ramifications of such parenting. Do the 13 girls named Wisdom feel even worse when they screw up? What happens when the 10 guys named Truth lie?
Then there's the issue of spelling. Are the 15 kids named Ruddy really that rosy-cheeked or are they really just Rudys?
We also had 72 kids named Sky, but also 85 named Skye (a Scottish island) and Skyy ( a premium vodka). How do you tell your child, "Daddy wanted to name you after the heavens above, but he can't spell a three-letter word."
Name Your Kid After Your Favorite Station
If you're really looking for parents who make sport of their children, consider that at least two children were named Espn, after the ESPN cable sports network.
Jason Curiel of Texas told the Dallas Morning News that he thought his wife was kidding when she made the suggestion. But the Corpus Christi couple loves sports.
"I thought she was pulling my chain and was going to suggest other names," he said. "But then he came and she was still for it. Even though the nurses would give me dirty looks and turn to my wife and say, 'His name, please?'"
Espn (pronounced "Espen") Curiel was born Sept. 24. His birth follows that in January 2000 of Espen Blondeel of Newaygo, Mich., whose parents were also sports fans but decided to go phonetic.
My Boy Morpheus The Matrix of Naming
In another case of life imitating art, five boys were named Morpheus, apparently after the hero of the sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix, portrayed by Laurence Fishburne. "I don't think there's a trace of that name existing before the film," Evans says (except for the Greek God of Dreams). "But now it's on the map."
The lead female character, Trinity, is faring even better. Between 1999 and 2000, the number of Trinitys tripled to 4,553, making it one of the fastest-growing girls' names.
Neo, the name of Keanu Reeves' character, scored only 113 names. "It's really not fair to compare," Evans says. "The movie obviously had an impact on naming. Trinity just started out as a real name, whereas Morpheus and Neo didn't really exist."
Reeves is so popular that he actually caused a naming controversy in Austria, where parents aren't allowed to invent names. Instead, they must prove that the name they give their child once belonged to another person.
When one Austrian couple wanted to name their son after the actor, officials objected, thinking Keanu was just a stage name. But, after doing some research, they discovered the name relates to the actor's Hawaiian ancestry.
Now, we Americans must debate the virtues of allowing parents to name children anything they want. Just imagine the playground torment some children must suffer.
"Hey, can you smell it? I guess Gouda must be coming."
"Don't listen to Bologna. She's full of it."
Buck Wolf is entertainment producer at ABCNEWS.com. The Wolf Files is published Tuesdays. If you want to receive weekly notice when a new column is published, join the e-mail list.
UNUSUAL NAMES
Unusual Names for children named in 2000. Source: Social Security Administraion
FOR GIRLS
Chianti (9) Dung (5) Rayon (5) Reality (16) Sincere (54) Sincerity (5) Sonny (11) Sunshine (93) Unique (24) Vanity (35) Whisper (29) Sparkle (23) Special (11)
FOR BOYS
Atom (11) Adonis (244) Cannon (117) Canon (49) Casanova (6) Cashmere (6) Champion (7) Coal (8) Cotton (5) Doc (5) Famous (6) Gator (5) Halston (10) Hutch (7) Legend (30) Magic (9) Maverick (211) Morpheus (5) Nature (5) Ruddy (15) Sincere (187) Starsky (6) Timberland (6) Trust (5) Truth (10) Tuff (8) Ventura (17) Wisdom (16) Lucky (48) Blue (27) Denim (7)
Speaking of food-related names, I went to school with a boy named "Ladel".
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For a few days I worked at the preparation tables alongside a black lady from Louisiana whose name was Ada. She was around 40, and this was nearly 30 years ago, so I guess she had been born before WW2. Chatting together as we worked, we got to the point where we started exchanging life stories. Somewhere about here she mentioned in passing that "Ada" was only an abbreviation for her full given names. So what were the full names? I asked. She wouldn't tell me. I made a joke of this and passed it round. Pretty soon everyone was egging on Ada to tell us her full names. Ada was a lady of spirit, and put up a good resistance, but at last she cracked. "My full names," she announced with great dignity, "are Adalee Idalee." I thought, and still think, that there is poetry in those names. Adalee Idalee! Poetry? there is music there. You could write a song about Adalee Idalee. If Chuck Berry had ever met this woman, I bet he would have done. "Adalee Idalee, oh! what you do to me..." And yet, of course, I would never even think of giving a child of my own a name anything like that. Why not? Here you crash up against the imponderables of culture and tradition, of folkways. White people from England just don't call their kids "Adalee Idalee." It's not our style. Even in the United States, where conventions are looser, you only find names like that in the south. You only really find them at full stretch among southern blacks. Southern whites go some way in the same direction, but nothing like as far. The black/white difference here is roughly the same as that between the Silly Party, whose candidate in the Monty Python Election Night sketch was Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim Bus Stop F'tang F'tang Olé Biscuitbarrel, and the Slightly Silly Party, represented by Kevin Phillips Bong. I have just been reading a photo-biography of Hank Williams, subtitled Snapshots from the Lost Highway. It includes a group photograph of his mother's family, poor whites in Garland, Alabama, around 1930. The given names are as follows: Hank, Ralph, Vollie Mae, Taft, Ollie Rae, J.C., Opal, Irene, Bernice, Marie, Lillie, Walter, Alice, Walter Jr., "Mrs. Ed," Ed, Eddie Lee, Letch, Bill, Zell, "Mrs. John," Bob, and Grover. My own children's forenames, for the record, are Eleanor Muriel "Nellie" and Daniel Oliver "Ollie." These patterns go way back. In his book The American Language, H. L. Mencken reports that black Americans of his time (I am working from the 1936 edition) tended to extremes in awarding names to their children. Many "the educated portion," says Mencken stuck firmly to the plainest American-English names like Frederick, James, Wilbur and George. However, when black Americans departed from this norm, they did so very wildly. Medical men making a malaria survey of Northampton County, North Carolina, staggered back to civilization with the news that they had found male Aframericans named Handbag Johnson, Squirrel Bowes, Prophet Ransom, Bootjack Webb, and Solicitor Ransom, and females named Alimenta, Iodine, Zooa, Negolia, Abolena, Arginta. and Dozine. Not all the wacky names arose from free choice, if Mencken can be believed. The young brethren who deliver colored mothers in the vicinity of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore sometimes induce the mothers to give their babies grandiose physiological and pathological names, but these are commonly expunged later on by watchful social workers and colored pastors. Placenta, Granuloma, and Gonadia, however, seem to have survived in a few places. In more recent times, those black Americans who want their kids to stand out from the general run of Michaels and Lindas (or, to be more up to date, Kyles and Ashleys) have developed a stock of names that either express ethnic pride in some way ("Ebony," for example, or "Tawnee"), or are derived from Swahili ("Barika," which means "successful") or Arabic ("Rasheed," which means "righteous"), or are just made up ("Davon," "Tashira," etc.). There is also a scattering of European names favored solely by blacks. If you find yourself on the phone with a Tyrone or a Clarence or a Letitia, you can be 99 percent sure it is a black person. (Though "Clarence" will be at least 40 years old this name seems to have dropped out of favor in the 1960s.) Other ethnic groups have a few trademark names, though nothing like to the extent black Americans do. I don't have much experience with Americans from the Indian subcontinent, but in the U.K., every other young man of that ancestry has the name "Neil." This is because "Anil" is a common Indian boy's name. (It's the Hindu god of wind not surprising so many babies get stuck with it.) On the other hand, in this area, my wife recently had a boss she used to talk about a lot over the dinner table, named Joanne. I didn't realize this person was from India until I took a phone call one day from a person with a thick subcontinental accent: "This is Joanne..." Among my large circle of American acquaintances from China, half the little girls seem to have been awarded either "Amy" (sounds like "pretty" in Chinese) or "Anna" (sounds like "peace") as an American name. Another subset has weird, off the wall given names, usually self-selected: I know a Teley, a Hugy, a Jacoba, and a Soff. One of the stars of the ten-pin bowling circuit in Hong Kong circa 1972 rejoiced in the name Hitler Wong.* This striving for originality is understandable, though. Chinese has only a small stock of last names, with an even smaller number of them heavily over-used. There are supposed to be about 85 million Zhangs; if they all seceded and formed a nation of their own, it would have more citizens than Germany. If I say "Nixon," or "Churchill," you know, within context, who I am talking about. This can hardly ever be done in Chinese, so originality in forenames is important. This used to be widely appreciated**, but in recent years, with the rising fashion for one-syllable given names, things are getting very confusing, and the whole system has broken down badly. When the PA announcer at Beijing airport asks Mr. Zhang Li to report to the information desk, half the young men in the departure lounge head over there. As Mencken shows, some groups have always been more willing than others to stamp their allegiance to Anglo-Saxon-Celtic culture on their name cards. Of 19th-century immigrants, he notes that Sephardic Jews were much more likely to hold on to Solomon, Nathan, and Isaac than the Ashkenazi were to Yosel, Yankel, and Ruven. Of the latter group, he says: "Presently their sons burst forth as Sidney, Irving, Milton, Stanley, and Monroe. Their grandsons are John, Charles, Harold, James, Edward..." (Their great-grandchildren are of course Erin, Siobhan, and Conor, a very peculiar phenomenon much remarked on the Hibernicization of American Jewry, perhaps deriving from a desire to sound goy without sounding WASP.) Similar differences can be seen today. It seems to me that Chinese and Indian immigrants are much readier to take up Anglo names than are, say, Hispanics, Haitians, or Muslim Arabs. Or blacks. The persistence of "black names" is at least in part a side effect of the great multicultural project of this past 30 years, an outgrowth of ethnic pride and a declaration of ethnic separatism, of "diversity." For blacks who want to be upwardly mobile, the consequences are mildly negative, as the Chicago-MIT study shows. A lot of employers are reluctant to hire blacks. Possibly there is some racism here. A bigger factor, I am sure, is the affirmative-action deficit the suspicion that whatever references or qualifications a black applicant might present to an interviewer were obtained in part through racial favoritism or intimidation. And a much bigger factor is the simple fear of crippling lawsuits. Whatever the reason, this is, as I said, unfair to a large number of Americans. The world, however, has a lot of petty unfairnesses of this kind built in to it. You can, if you choose, spend all your time seething about them or confronting them. If, on the other hand, you would prefer to just get on with life, you can dodge nimbly round most of these minor obstacles with very little effort. If I were a black American who wanted to get ahead in an honest career, I would trade in "Davon" for "David." That, of course, would be "acting white"; but at least I would be able to repent my act of racial treason from the comfort of a good job and a decent income.
* Not necessarily an endorsement of the Austrian corporal's policies. There was a spell in the 1930s when Chiang Kai-shek's government in China was getting a lot of military assistance and help from Germany, and some flattering biographies of Hitler were circulating in China. Chinese people who did not follow subsequent events very closely ended up with a vague feeling of warm admiration for Hitler. ** And generated its own problems. Chinese is, as everyone knows, not written alphabetically. To write Chinese, you use complicated little squiggles, and there are thousands of the darn things. Only about 4,000 are actually current, and I doubt any Chinese person carries more than 6,000 in his head. If you dig around in old books, however, you can turn up far more characters, some of them used just once in the entire 3,000-year history of the written Chinese language. Father Wieger, to whom I resort for information on this sort of thing (but who was writing 80 years ago) says the following: "The dictionary of Kangxi [compiled in A.D. 1716] contains 40,000 characters that may be plainly divided as follows: 4,000 characters in common use; 2,000 doubles and proper names of limited use; 34,000 monstrosities of no practical use." Those monstrosities are very tempting to a certain kind of mentality, though, and bookish Chinese people sometimes make a nuisance of themselves by giving their children really obscure characters as names. When you come across these in reading, or on business cards, you have to find a humongous scholarly dictionary and look them up. Since the written language is not phonetic, unless you do this, you have no idea how to pronounce the name! |
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http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire012403.asp
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Really, this reminds me of a time back in college. Sitting with my friend Marianna (still the best set of legs I've ever seen), and me and another guy were laughing over the name "Mike Hunt." (think about it) She didn't get it. She kept saying it aloud, over and over, louder and louder, util there were about 6 or 7 rows of people staring at her, while I was trying my best not to burst out laughing.
Then she got it.
Then she punched me. Hard. ;) Ah, memries....
I don't see that date anywhere, but I didn't look that hard. My previous comment was in regard to the fact that this was posted in the Breaking News sidebar. (Hence the 3, 2, 1...)
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