Author Archives: notwithoutmyhandbag

My (relative) is named Chantz Robert (last name). No joke.

I know a four-year-old named Soleil Moon Star (last name).

– C

I have had my hand in unfortunate names, and I issue my apoligies to my neice and godchild. I was young!

Neice: Krystyn Ambyr Rachyl. The Y’s were my idea. I was twelve; her parents were not. We call her ‘Rachyl’, and she refuses to spell it with the Y.

Godchild: My best friend got pregnant as a teenager. She wanted to name the eventual baby: Picard Geordi, Luke Walker, or Darth. Girls would have been Beverly Deanna, Mara Jade, or Leia Alder. “It’s a little different! No one will notice!”

Fortunatly wiser heads prevailed. Her father threatened to throw her out. The baby was named Gene Lucas, after the creators of her favorite shows.

-R

The homecoming queen at our high school when I was 10th or 11th grade (keep in mind, this was the late ’70s) named her daughter Skye Blue. Thankfully, she waited till she graduated from high school to have her second child, but that didn’t help his name at all: Forrest Green.

When the priest asked during Skye’s baptism what saint would watch over the poor thing (since her mother apparently wasn’t), the Homecoming Queen replied, “All the angels in heaven.” Let’s hope so.

-Beth Ann (sister to Carol-Lyn and Lyn Marie — the hyphenating was Carol-Lyn’s idea. She refused to have anyone call her by just the first name, because of my parents’ only partially successful brainwashing attempts: According to my mother, none of the three of us have middle names. The double names are all our first names — Mom didn’t want anyone calling us by nicknames, which explains why everyone in the family still calls me “Bethy” and my youngest sister “Lynny”. Ummm … no one calls Carol-Lyn, except collect.)

One of the worst names I’ve ever heard:

Nimrod Weiselfish. He’s from (a city in Connecticut). Although Nimrod is the mighty hunter from the Old Testament, it’s still one hell of a bad name to give a kid!

-S

When all else fails, name your kid after water:

It’s a girl! Announcing the arrival of:

Dasani Evian
BORN:
(date deleted), 2006
WEIGHT:
6 lbs. 11 oz.

-J.

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

I went to Jr. High School with a girl named Sunshine Black. On all the role sheets she was listed as “Black, Sunshine”.

Also my best friend’s name is Elsa Pena Tovar. So initial-wise she can c hoose between E.T. and E.P.T.

-G

OK, I can’t top most of your names. But I really did meet an African couple, that thought to pick more “western” names for their kids before they moved to the USA. Their picks were “Bambi” and “Thumper”. “Bambi” I can see as a girls name (although the cartoon deer was a stag), but “Thumper”? It was a boy. Altho if he becomes a boxer, he’s got it made….

-Darrold

In my own family we are, in birth order.

Mona corinna charissma
Shenandoah Louise
Catlin aureliana
Reata ann
And
Till-Taylor Robert-George.

I left Amanda jaqueline off the list because some how she got lucky.

-Shena

I used to stop regularly at the same fast food restaurant on my way to rehearsals for various theatre productions. The same woman always worked the drive through and I finally had to ask her, “How do you pronounce your
name?”

“Treevy-AL,” she replied.

The spelling on her name tag was “Trivial.” Her parents named her “Insignificant.”

Then again, my parents chose to spell my name “Allen” (which is generally how it’s spelled with it is a last name) rather than the more common “Alan” ensuring that I will probably never find a souvenir coffee mug with my name
on it.

Then again, at least they didn’t come up with “Allyn” or something worse.

–Allen