Back in the ‘90s George Carlin did a bit on how he was sick of guys named Todd. It’s a newfangled, weak-sounding, goofy name, he said. He listed a bunch of other ridiculous boys’ names—Cody, Tucker, and Flynn being a few of them. He’s right; these are silly names. And things have only gotten worse since the ‘90s.
If you spend any time around people who are at the baby-making stage of life, you’ve probably encountered some real head-scratchers of names lately. It’s not limited to boys. Baby girls are suffering, too. American society is currently in a state of baby-naming anarchy. Anything goes, evidently. Mothers and fathers are naming their kids after fruits, turning surnames into first names, using improbably spelled foreign names, and even (it seems) inventing names out of thin air.
It would be impossible to compile an exhaustive list of all the bad baby names I’ve heard recently. But you know what kind of names I’m talking about. Like when your cousin comes to a family get-together and says, “This is our new baby ______,” and people furrow their brows a bit and say, “Oh.” Or the baby announcements in the employee newsletter: “Eric and Katie welcomed their new son ____________,” and it looks like they filled in the blank by mixing up Scrabble letters on the kitchen table.
I think in the past few years I’ve heard more bad baby names than good ones. Classic names like Paul, Michael, Jane, James, Claire, and Katherine seem to be on the wane. If you were to ask the parents why they chose not to use one of these more recognizable names, you’d probably get the same response from all of them: “We wanted something unique.”
It’s almost an admirable impulse. Almost. Why wouldn’t a kid want an unusual name? It sounds like what everyone wishes for: going through life being one of a kind, and without any effort. What parents don’t realize is that it’s actually out of selfishness that they choose their strange baby names. No one chooses “Ryder” over “Peter” because it’s likely to make the kid happier. They choose it because it’s likely to make them, as parents, seem hipper (or something).
Parents have a difficult time seeing their children as independent people, and so they don’t consider what it might be like to live as an adult with a name like “Fenton” or “Milligan” (for a woman, no less!) or “Camden”. Would you really want people to do a double-take every time you introduced yourself at a party? Would it not be better to be able to say, “Hi, I’m John,” and just be done with it?
Picking up where Carlin left off, Louis CK does a bit where he says “there should be a couple of laws” about what you can and can’t name your kid. I think there used to be laws about that, and they were collectively called “culture.” Parents 100 years ago had just as much freedom to name their kids whatever the hell they wanted, but they didn’t, because they were living in a society that actually had expectations for civilized behavior.
So is it symbolic of the decadence of American culture that we now have no norms for what we call our kids? If our baby-naming has descended into anomie, will our morals and relationships follow? Maybe so, but I’m not one to predict the future.
One thing I will do is give parents-to-be this advice: give your kid a name that could plausibly be that of a soldier, an artist, or a corporate executive. Those three vocations pretty well cover the entire spectrum of life choices. See how well the proposed name fits into each of these blanks:
“_______ has been decorated in battle several times over for bravery, selflessness, and outstanding skull-crushing ability.”
“An invite to _______’s SoHo loft is one of the most coveted status symbols in the New York art world.”
“_______ cleared eight figures last year through a series of hostile takeovers and cutthroat stock market deals.”
If the kid’s name works for all three of these, go with it.
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