Category: Bad Baby Names

My husband left me for a woman who was named (and i’m not kidding here) after the biscuit her mother craved during pregnancy – the biscuit (that’s Aussie for “cookie,” Americanskis) is a very plain, dunk it in the coffee type biscuit called “NICE” (pronounced like “niece”) but to give it a true French Flavour her mother put “Le” on the front so she is known as “Lenisse” – my home was wrecked by someone who is literally the biscuit!!!!!!!

And finally two poor children i know of are saddled with the names “Luna Power” and “Natas Power” now Luna I can handle as being slightly ok – but when you spell NATAS backwards we seem to have a new winner in the anti-christ race…..

-Rachael

I was born in 1954 and given the name Lanson, which wasn’t cool growing up with and isn’t cool now. Cannot find it in any name listing.

It’s not made up. It was my fathers cousins name. I’ve only seen it twice, once on a champagne bottle and once on an automatic door mat. I do alot of genealogy research. Bad names go back a long way. Here’s one I found, really, and it’s a girls name. Honest, I’m not making this up. Ready? Mahershallalhashbaz Gorton !!!!

Don’t put this on your site because some idiotic parent will probably think it’s cool!!!

Thanks for listening……my new and improved name..Lance

Oh, but Ms. Gorton’s not the only Mahershallalhashbaz out there.

Actor Mahershalalhashbaz Ali (note slightly different spelling) appeared on the TV show “Crossing Jordan.” And yep, it’s his birthname (although he changed his last name from Gilmore) and is often credited as simply M. Ali.

Like many very long, very odd names, it’s biblical (Isaiah 8:1-3). Mahershalalhashbaz is Isaiah’s son by “the prophetess.” God ORDERS him to give the kid this name.

So yes, it’s a boy’s name.

I worked for a couple of years as an editor at a company that created multimedia seminars featuring noted professionals from the tech industry. There were a few odd names that passed through, of course, but my all-time favorite was “Ransom Love.” Possibly the most cynical porn name ever conceived.

Now, my question — a few years ago, I read a news article about a pair of parents (in Switzerland or Sweden — I forget exactly where) who gave their kid a name that was more than twenty letters long and contained no vowels. Supposedly, they were subsequently fined by a court for inflicting such an inhumane name on their child. My question to you is simply whether you’ve heard this story or have any way of confirming it. I’ve already tried Snopes.com to see if it’s a reported hoax, but it didn’t turn up, nor have I been able to find it through Google. My hope is mainly that another of your readers may have already brought it to your attention.

And, of course, if the story is true, I’d love to know what the name was.

Thanks,
Alexander

Yep, the story is true, and comes out of Sweden, which has tight regulations on what you can and can’t name your kid. Most recently, Swedish officials rejected a couple wanting give their baby the middle name Superman, and the courts are busy mediating a suit between a family whose last name is the same as the name of the Scandinavian version of Surge soda, Urge. (It’s against the law to use a family name in a trademark iin Sweden so four of the six total members of the Urge family in the whole country are suing Coca-Cola. Makes you wonder about how McDonald’s handles it.)

Anyway, to answer Alexander’s question, according to Whiteboard News, the kid’s name was to be “Brfxxccxxmnpccccllllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116.” Pronounced “Albin.”

A local court last month fined them $750 for failing to register a first name for their child by his fifth birthday.Responding to the fine, the parents, who were not identified, submitted the 43-letter name, saying it was a “pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation.” The court rejected the name.

The parents took their case to an appeal court in Gothenburg, saying their son’s name should be seen in a pataphysical spirit.

Pataphysics was the invention of French absurdist writer and satirist Alfred Jarry, best known for his trilogy of Ubu plays.

It was purported to go beyond metaphysics and was the “science of imaginary solutions” or a logic of the absurd. It was analyzed in his book “Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien.”

The Gothenburg court rejected the appeal and ruled the parents must pay the fine.

I just found your site and giggled my way through it. And then realized that I have some names to contribute. My mom went to school with girls named Pepper Salter and Belle Tinker, and I know a boy named Pedro DePedro.

Lillie

I’d like to suggest an adition to your list of bad name combos. My hubby claims to have gone to school with a boy named Gunnar – his last name was Re – Gunnar Re. In our language (Danish) that’s pronounced very much like the STD gonorrhea, poor kid.

-Maren

This past weekend I went to a party. A couple were there with their 3 boys – Ulysses, Adonis, and baby Orion. I have no idea what the middle names are, but hope they’re more normal!

-K

Your website has been my salvation in my search to try to name my second child before my husband and I divorce over it.

Jenny A named a child Bayne??? As in “this child is the bane of my life”?? My OED defines bane (admittedly not Bayne, but who wants to spell things right, anyway) as “cause of trouble or ruin”, as in the curse of having to give children increasingly awful names.

My recommendation is that these parents leave the naming of children to their other children, who, on the face of present evidence, would do better at it. We reckon our two year old, Harlan (OK, OK, not the most common name in the world but (a) we didn’t make it up and (b) you can spell and pronouce it), will choose to name our second son “Apricot Bang Run”, being his favourite words. At that stage I hadn’t realised that someone on your website was going for Run already….. out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, huh?

The best names I came across were those children I taught at a school in New Delhi when I was 18. The absolute best was Baby Rhythm, and I have since wondered what she did during her years of trying to be a bolshie teenager, and how this will affect her future attempts to be a leader of industry…. “Baby Rhythm is a tough negotiator” “Baby Rhythm demands a bonus to sort out the company’s infrastructure”, it doesn’t really work unless you’re four, really, does it?

My husband, who is the son of two Irish immigrants, snears at length about the trend for these mad Irish/Gaelic names and spellings that are now very trendy in Britain. Gaelic was rarely a written language (and frankly for many centuries hardly a used language at all, unlike, say, Welsh) for a long time and these completely non-phonetic spellings are to an extent a great joke by the Irish on everyone who wishes to prove their Irish ancestry or are attracted to the Irish culture (of enjoying yourself, drinking a lot, singing, dancing and all planting the same species of potato). All these Niamhs and Siobhans don’t particularly fit an Irish pronunciation of those letters, but it does make people feel different to give their child a name neither they nor their teacher will be able to spell. Which really will help them not be confused about the sounds that letters make. May be it’s a plot to stamp out literacy…..

Thank you for giving us all some perspective on the great naming crisis.

-Rosalind, U.K.

A friend of mine was going to call her baby Tallulah-lula-lala Stewart if it was a girl, thank heaven it was a boy and they called him David.

-G

In our parish there is a family that adopted the mix-and-match practice when it came to naming their kids. The husband (Shubert) and wife (Grizelda) first used half of each name to christen their daughter ‘Shuzelda’. When they had a son a year later, they used the left-overs and actually named him ‘Grishuber’ No kidding! He was in class with me and the teachers had to enunciate that name daily during roll call.

In office, there is a guy named Sejal. His wife is Tejal! Wonder what the kids will be called?

Also in office, is another guy with a weird name. Apparently his parents were fans of a rather mediocre hindi film actor called Rajesh Khanna. Now Rajesh is a pretty common first name in these parts and Khanna an equally common surname. So these people named their son Rajeshkhanna (followed by their surname).

I also have a friend named Elvis who at one time liked a girl named Pressie.

G.C.

I work at Wawa, a convenience store chain located in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia.

The current owner of Wawa is one Richard Wood. Of course, he goes by Dick Wood. He may even be a junior, but I’ve blocked out all of the information we learned in orientation.

Michelle