In Her Spare Time She Destroys Tokyo

[akirlu]

In my present mood, this compendium of really awful suggestions for baby names, complete with the redactor's snarky comments, is emphatically not work safe, largely because I'm in danger of aspirating my own uvula trying not to laugh out loud.

All thanks to supergee. Is genius, eh?

Comments

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

OH. MY. GOD. I can see why you're strangling on your uvula and I've only looked at the first page. It was the Dawn to Dusk comment that did me in. I scared the cats I laughed so loudly.

On the other hand, my middle name is Kathryn and I don't think it permanently scarred me. Except no one has used that since I was 10 -- except maybe my mother when exasperated beyond the bounds of endurance. Which I did more than my fair share of I guess.

MKK

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. Page 2 is even better.

New age, schizophrenic, D&D playing Mormons!

Vicious Lytton Strachey readers! A gang of them!

You know it's the comments that make this.

MKK-- and now I MUST quit and leave for the Dr.'s office.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I ran into this page in rec.arts.sf.composition earlier today, and I've been about strangling with laughter ever since. The comments do make it. They're vicious, spiteful, and fairly literate, as if Alice Roosevelt Longworth had decided to concentrate on bad baby names. My favorite comment so far: 'Yeah, well I lived in a world where plurals aren't spelled with apostrophes. "Comrade's! To give your kid's normal name's is against the teaching's of our fearless leader! You will change your way's and have lots of kid's with pretentious name's!" '

My middle name is also Kathryn, and it hasn't blighted my life in the slightest. My first name, on the other hand, simply by being the name by which I am not addressed, has blighted my life a fair amount, a thing my mother should have realized would happen, given that she also has a completely unused first name just occupying space on her driver's license.

Parents: no stupid names. No badly spelled names. And none of this forcing the child to go by the middle name instead of the first name.

This name thing made me think about the name of a friend of mine from college, Grover Joseph St. Pierre Rees, III. We called him Rocky, and we were pretty sure that Garry Trudeau used his early career as Chief Justice of American Samoa as inspiration for parts of Duke's diplomatic career. Rocky is now the American ambassador to East Timor, demonstrating that an improbable name is no impediment to advancement.

Wait, I've just realized that my life isn't actually completely blighted. It's all right; go ahead and scramble the order of the names as you please, and give your children whatever silly-ass names you please. Remember that Diana Goodman will make fun of them, and so will the rest of us.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, I've only filled in the last name section of the birth certificate application. There's still time to incorporate these useful suggestions!

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Deep, deep down in this site, on page 14, I found this: 'New naming rule: If in typing the name out you have to follow it immediately with another version in parentheses, because otherwise no one would have the slightest clue this was supposed to be a name and not Klingon for "Wax my forehead, supple wench," this is a bad, bad, woah bad bad name.'

Really, now I'm going to back away from the keyboard. I needed to laugh today, but I don't think I needed to laugh this much. It's starting to hurt.