canspice.org

A couple of submissions from friends to break the bad baby name drought. The first comes from one DPP, and it’s about teachers in the UK ‘profiling’ children by their names. It’s hard not to make fun of names like K’tee, which I thought was a Vulcan character from Star Trek and not a mashup of Katie, and Gyaike, which is apparently the way stupid people spell Jake. There’s also Chevaughn, which I think might be pronounced ‘Kevin’, but I’m not entirely sure.

The best part of that article is the actual point of it: there’s some sort of correlation between stupidly-spelled names and the child’s behaviour. One teacher, upon circling names on her roster to flag ‘bad’ ones before meeting the kids, reports a 75% hit rate. Sure, there are ordinary names like Wayne and Kyle in the bad list, but if you look at the ‘good’ list there’s not a hyphen to be seen. Every name is normal. I’m disappointed that Brad isn’t in the good list.

The second submission is from the fine folks at blather, and it’s the ‘Complete Silly Names’ list from Cornwall County Council. It’s a cornucopia of naming hilarity, with the Odd Couples list and the More than Double Barrelled list. The names go back into the 1500s, showing that bad names aren’t a recent innovation. A few good selections:

• Emily Grace Pyne Coffin
• William Alexander Wood Forest
• Nicholas Bone married Priscilla Skin
• Phillip Phillips married Phillip Loggins

Then there are the names of people. Just taking from the A-C Surnames list we’ve got Araminta Bunster Burne, Narcissus Backway, and Absolom Beaglehole. As Paul says, “and of course, Fanny Cobbledick isn’t funny at all.”