Naming Your Child
 

Ever come across someone and wonder what their parents were thinking when they named them? Sometime ago, I was on a conference call for work when we heard someone call in late. The moderator paused and asked who had joined.

"Walter."
"Walter, what's your last name?"
"Melon."

...

There was a long pause from the group. Yep: Walter Melon. It was so distracting and I couldn't stop from cracking up, eventually having to mute the phone. How is it that someone like that gets through their childhood years? How do you grow up and not hate your parents for it? I can't imagine the daily torture that the poor guy must have gone through.

Ah, I suppose it could be worse, though.

Good morning, class! My name is...

I hope that is a mistake.

Once someone gets the courage to explain it to her, she'll be asking people to "just call me Susan."

I have a list of favorites. There are numerous "What were you thinkings" that we've collected over the years at work.

Oh crap. I think I can't tell you some of the best ones because of HIPPA. :P I'll have to go through the list and find the ones that weren't patients.

Oh, wait ... this guy's a probation officer, so I can tell yah ...

Shane Shady.

See, we actually thought about all this crap... we wanted names that were common enough that people would know them, but not the big common names everybody was using. And we wanted names with only one spelling, and we made sure the initials didn't spell anything embarassing.

You can't plan for everything. My parents thought they chose the perfect name, common, no obvious mocking nicknames arising from it, no strange spellings... end result? I hate my name because it's so boring.

To that end I plan on giving my kids more interesting (though not outright weird) names, and I'm sure they'll resent them for their own reasons just like me.

I once had a neigbor who had the last name of "Rule." He named his two kids "Slide" and "Golden." I kid you not. I always liked my first name until Bill Clinton came along. At the time I was working a job that required us to wear name tags. The joke got old before I heard the first one.:rolleyes:

LOL, ok. When I worked in the fraud department of Fleet Bank, I had to make outbound calls to cardholders and verify their card activity. You had to make these calls through a dialer, which would bring up the customer automatically. You could manually work the dialer as well. If you could not get in touch with the customer, you had the option of sending a letter with a number that they could call Fleet to verify the activity.

Well, I would come across the strangest names, especially if they were not English names. Imagine my surprise when the name:

"Ding Ding"

came up on my screen. No way was I talking to that person (I was laughing too damned hard), so they got the letter. :D

Another name I came across (not at Fleet, but at another job):

Bhang Pow

:haha:

Hope I'm not breaking any laws by revealing those names...heh!

I worked with a guy named Warren Pete

A gal I met at a party has a teenage daughter. There is a set of twins in her daughter's class. Their first names are pronounced

o-ran-gel-o
and
le-mon-gel-o

emphasis on the second syllable

They are written like this:

Orangejello
Lemonjello

Oh how could I ever forget THIS name:

Scenario: Radio station in Baltimore. DJ asks people to call up and give shout outs.

DJ: "Yeah hellooo who's this?"

Caller: "Yeah um hi. My name is Shayleilakweykwey!" (since there is no way I could spell this properly, I am spelling it the way it sounded.)

DJ: "Shayleila who-what??!!"

Caller: "Shayleilakweykwey!"

DJ: "Is that your whole name?"

Caller: "No that's my first name!"

:haha: I cried rivers of laughter on that one. That had to be THE most ghetto name in the history of names!!! :D

Their mum should be inprisoned over that, talk about cruel and unusual.

I've heard of the brothers Orangejello and Lemonjello many times over the last few years... I think it's an urban legend.

We named our daughter Ashlynn Illyrica Winter. TS picked out the first name, I picked out the second (it's the name of an ancient greek city that I once read about, and I thought it was pretty), and Winter---well, it's a pretty name, and she was born when there was, unexpectedly in La., snow on the ground.

Ashlynn is just normal enough. Illyrica is pretty much unique, and Winter is just pretty.

I hate common, or overly popular names....I wanted her to have a name that no one else had.

Heywood Jablowme.:)

If i recall correctly I think in Germany and also France you cant just pick a name out the air for your child. The name that goes on their birth certificate has to conform to certain standards.

Mine conformed to standards at the time and a lot of good that ended up doing me.:D

In Canada too, the government can reject your child's name and make you pick a new one.