Earlier this week, I distributed an e-mail about a high school football star named Yourhighness Morgan, certainly one of the stranger names I remember seeing, but since the kid plays linebacker, my guess is that very few people tease him about it. Seeing his name got me thinking about the whole concept of naming children and the recent trend to bestow unique, or almost unique, names on your offspring. I suspect that this is a cultural phenomenon, that as people become increasingly aware of their relative insignificance in the greater scheme of life (something they are constantly reminded of in our celebrity-centric culture), they seek out ways to assert individuality. Seeing this got me thinking and doing some research into strange names. Here is what I found.
Celebrities set trends. Their fame derives, in part, from their supposed individuality, particularly as you descend the scale of famousness toward the Paris Hilton’s of the world, whores in things besides publicity. Daniel Boorstin discussed this back in 1962 in his seminal article, The Image, which discussed those who become “famous for being famous.” These people would lose celebrity status if they did not take measures to keep their name before the public, albeit usually through tawdry activity. Cancellation of the Hollywood Squares would achieve the same purpose. Somewhere on the playground slide toward cultural decadence it was discovered that one way to prolong your own fame and pass it to the next generation is to provide strange names to your children.
Frank Zappa was, and still is, acknowledged royalty in the game, naming his two children Dweezil and Moon Unit. By the way, Zappa denied ever defecating on stage and said that the closest he ever came to eating shit was at a Holiday Inn in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Where the name Dweezil came from, I have no idea, but for those of you too young to remember, the name Moon Unit came from a character in the comic strip, Dick Tracy. Way back in the early 1960s, the creator of Dick Tracy, evidently in the throes of a hallucinatory moment, veered his hero away from fighting crime and into interstellar travel, complete with yellow spaceships with strange appendages and alien beings. His son’s love interest was a teenage alien named Moon Unit. Moon Unit had big hair, ample bosoms, and horns on top of her forehead. That reminds me of this woman I used to date, oh, never mind...
I believe that seeing Dick Tracy in outer space is when I first contemplated how useful drugs might be, but as you may already know, this was definitely the moment that Dick Tracy jumped the shark, never to recover, but the memory lives on through the offspring of the man who gave us the Mud Shark.
Bono named his child Elijah Bob Patricius Guggi Q. I am not sure what to make of that name, other than to say that it just provides further evidence that Bono is full of shit. I must add that the The Edge, the guitarist in U-2, really isn’t that good of a guitarist. David Bowie named his child Zowie Bowie. He must have fathered the child when he wasn’t sleeping with Mick Jagger (look it up yourself). Keith Richards named his child Dandelion after one of the songs he wrote for Through the Past, Darkly, the LP with the cover shaped like a stop sign. For the record, Dandelion later changed her name to Angela, probably because everyone made fun of her because of her dumb name.
Anyway, hoi polloi have picked up on the trend.
Most people do not know that the Social Security Administration actually maintains lists of the most common children’s names. They also look at the most rare, our interest here. The latest compilation I found was from 2002.
The most common names that year were Jacob and Emily. I once had a cat named Emily, but she died.
Six boys were named Timberland by their parents. There is no mention of any girls named Manolo Blahnik. However, there were 298 girls named Armani, which is probably as close as anyone in those families is ever going to get to the real thing.
Forty-nine boys were named Canon, surely the children of photographers. There is no record of anyone named Nikon or Kodak. I wonder if any of the last names were Sure Shot.
Sky was the name of 72 kids, but another 85 had the same name, only spelled it Skye or Skyy. The former is an Irish island, which is defensible, but the latter is the name of a vodka, evidently a high class vodka. My suggestions to parents wishing to name children after alcohol spirits are to choose Colt 45 or Mad Dog. Those wishing a generic, man of the people name, might consider Forty Ounce. A good drug name for boys is Crack Head; for girls, Crack Whore. Both are fine names.
Two sets of parents deserve jail time and their children should be taken from them for naming their children after ESPN, the sports network. One child in Texas was named Espn Curiel, while one in Michigan was named Espen Blondeel. The latter spelling is the way the name is pronounced phonetically. Even though I am opposed to the death penalty, I may rethink my position.
Sadly, scarring children is by no means a recent phenomenon. My mother actually knew a boy from her childhood in Chattanooga named States Rights Finley. I would bet that his family supported the rebel cause. Whaddaya think?
I know of two women in Alabama with that name, that is, Alabama. One is from a prominent family in Birmingham. She told me once that she was named for her mother. There were five girls in her mother’s family: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Virginia, and Katherine. I cannot explain it. Maybe there was already a cousin named Mississippi.
One final thought. All of you know that I have no child, but if I ever do I think I would name it Child Support. In today’s America, I would have a fifty-fifty chance of being correct.
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