In the Boston Globe, I read this article about Hugo Burnham, a member of the pioneering punk rock British band Gang of Four. The article said that now he lives in Massachusetts with his wife, and:

“The couple … live in Gloucester with their 4-year-old daughter, TS, named after John Irving’s T.S. Garp (and pronounced “Tess”).”

I’m completely horrified. In case you haven’t read the book, T.S. Garp is a man who also has a terrible baby name origin, but at least it’s fiction! The story is that his mother, a very strange woman, was also a nurse. She was caring for a soldier, Technical Sargeant Garp, who was injured and unconscious, but with a constant erection. She saw this as the ideal way to have a baby without having a man in her life, so she impregnated herself by him, and named the baby TS Garp after all she knew of that solider’s name.

To name any baby T.S. after Garp is weird and horrible (technical sargeant?). And a girl baby is worse. And then to pronounce it “Tess” is compounding the horror. (In the book, he’s always just called “Garp.”) Okay, I suppose if they had named their daughter “Garp,” that might have been worse. Sigh.

Couldn’t it at least have been after TS Eliot? (Who was in fact Thomas Stearns Eliot).

– Shari