Category: Bad Baby Names

My local paper published an article in September about unusual names of local citizens, including “Dayspring Jubilee Devan” and “Song -in-the-Night Sarah Eleanor”

However, far more disturbing is this sidebar feature (which I couldn’t find on the website, but perhaps it is there somewhere) of a sample of unusual names culled from the Lucas County (Ohio) Health Department’s Office of Vital Statistics (and I saved the worst for last.)

Montana Raine
Trinity Faith
A’Miracle
Blessed (what? why not go all the way and make her ‘Blessed Be!’)
Ah’Moni
Camay (maybe her brothers are Dial and Safeguard, with a sister called Irish Spring?)
Somore (everyone wants Somore!)
Lyzerre Unique
Verician Diamondnique Trishaun (alien life form? junk jewelry? Three-he aded Shaun?) And for the worst name I have ever seen bestowed upon an innocent child:

Sexujuan Levon.

Is that an R. Kelly wannabe, or just someone’s tragically unfortunate r endering of Szechuan? Man, that poor kid. Thanks for a great web site!

-Cheryl

I myself am no stranger to the misspelled and misprounced. My mother, a Filipina, named me Cassie Margarita Delinda Yoder.

My father is an American of Mennonite/Amish Swiss-German descent. Hence the last name, YODER. MARGARITA is fairly straight forward; easily pronounced and a saint’s name to boot. DELINDA my mom probably made up in the florid way Filipinos have with names.

And CASSIE? Easy, right? But wait! Not everything is as it seems—CASSIE is not pronounced CASSIE, but CASEY!!

WHY??? WHY WHY WHY? I understand English was not my mother’s first language, but why did my dad let her put CASSIE on the birth certificate for CASEY???????? He has no reasonable explanation for me, probably because there isn’t one. I’ve suffered through 21 years of misspelled and misprounced, and I’m sick of it. I didn’t grow up with my mother in my life, so it seems silly for me to grin and bear it namewise for a woman I barely know.

Suffice it to say that when I marry in June I will be doing a major name overhaul. I will become Casey Yoder (fiance’s last name.)

Yours in namedom,
Cassie/Casey/KC/Kacie/Casie/Casee/Kasey/Kassee/etc

I’m not sure if you need a user account to access posts at ivillage or not, so I’ll copy it here (along with the link):

“Subject: DH nixed 8 out of 13 names on my list!!

We had names for #1 & #2 picked out early on, this one has been so difficult, dh is only coming up with names that aren’t my style like Martin, Raymond – sorry, but not my style.

I have been searching and searching, presented my latest list last night of: Cade, Caden, Grant, Karsten, Keegan, Logan, Reece, Roark and Rowen for a boy.

Alyssa, Grace, Selah and Teghan for a girl.

He now has it narrowed down to Grant, Logan or Roark for a boy and Alyssa or Grace for a girl.

Logan has become a unisex name, so I’d rather that only be a middle name, Roark is kind of hard to say, I’m worried people will get confused, Alyssa has become so popular, I liked Grace for a middle name to something.

Nothing goes together – are we ever going to find another name to go with our boys?

– (normal name), mom to Ryan Kyler (3) and Kane Riley (21 mos) and due 1/20”

Found last week:

Kodiak Bay.

I wish I were kidding.

-F

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