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Thursday, September 10, 2009

Really?

So I was perusing the online newspaper of our little town here, and clicked on the link for birth announcements. Mostly because I have an odd fascination with baby names and the alternative option was to start my closet cleaning project.
I had to share my findings with you, because I believe something is going terribly wrong in our country when it comes to naming children.
There were 14 birth announcements on the page. Half of the children had names that I would consider normal and were spelled in a way that might not scar the child for life. Half of those "normal" 7 names did however have hyphenated last names, which will at the very least leave the kid annoyed during standardized testing at school.
And that leaves us with the other 50% of the names listed.
Here they are:

Analiha Mya Louise
Kasun Ray
Alyxis Bailey
Meadoe-MiKall Mae
Kynlee Michelle
Tanis Citrine
AnaLis Kemmen

I'm sorry if I'm offending any of you out there, but seriously? What's with the "y" that everyone seems to feel is necessary to throw into names? I mean, poor Alyxis. No one will ever spell that right, and I'm assuming her parents pronounce it Alexis, but technically it's spelling would indicate a pronunciation of "Ah-lick-sis."
And don't even get me started on Meadoe-MiKall Mae. Ummm, what?
AnaLis will be reminding people for the rest of her life to capitalize the "L" and Tanis & Kasun will probably be hearing a lot of "huh?" in their days.
Analiha Mya Louise, in addition to her 3 first names, also has a hyphenated last name!
I guess I might be picking unfairly on Kynlee, as there are many nice names out there that have different spelling variations. But I do wonder how her parents settled on her specific spelling. Off the top of my head I can think of at least 15 different ways it may be spelled.
Kinly
Kinley
Kinleigh
Kinlie
Kinlee
Kenly
Kenley
Kenleigh
Kenlie
Kenlee
Kynly
Kynley
Kynleigh
Kynlie
Kynlee

And holy cow, you should see how this post just lit up when I hit spell check!

Public Service Announcement: Before you name your children, picture them as a 45 year old. If you don't think your adult son will mind having a gender-neutral name spelled in an effeminate manner, then go ahead and choose "Morgyn".
But if I were you I'd play it a safe, Morgyn might be getting swirlies all through school because of you.

4 comments:

Heather and Scott said...

It's all because of you we didn't choose Alyvia :) Still love that name! :)

Trey and Mel's Piece of the Net! said...

That's pretty funny! Trey's Mom is a nurse practitioner in North Mississippi and they keep a running list of odd names that come through the ER. Some shining examples are:
La Pepsi
Ii
Le-a (not pronounced lee a, like you would think but le dash a)
Shithead (shi thead, not shit head)

And about the Y thing, I have a friend whose kids names are Bryce and Trynt, weird.

With the way the weird naming is so popular, our poor son is going to get picked on for having such a weird name as Matthew!

Sgt. Wolverine said...

Le-a has occurred up here in Michigan too. When my friend passed that one along, I didn't actually believe her at first. Once I believed her, I started musing about other marks to use in names. Tilde? Bracket? Parenthesis? Apostrophe? Semicolon?

What irks me about this incomprehensible desire to invent unique variations or entirely new names is that there are already so many great names that aren't in popular usage. My first name (Burrill, pronounced like Burl) is very rare, but it's been around: I was named after a relative of mine who was around some 250 years before I was born. I have yet to find my name in any baby name book or website, but it's established as an existing name. (It's around as a last name, too, but it was a first name long before I had it.)

Jen McD said...

These poor kids. Their parents are idiots. Can you imagine what they are teaching them at home if they think Anal in any part of her name is acceptable? It took me several reads to even figure out how to pronounce them.

God please be with those babies. And your friend Mel's comment... seriously! Shithead! I'm going to encourage my children to become therapists, they will have a booming business in 20 more years.