The Bad Baby Names Phenomenon
The internet has spawned many
phenomena that didn't exist just a few short years ago. It's
hard to believe, but there was a time when we all got along,
somehow, without the help of things that today seem indispensable:
email; instant messaging; photo sharing; 24 hour weather reports
for anywhere on the planet; circles of 'friends' wider than
North America; and forums or chat rooms for every topic under
the sun.
Of all the forum topics that
have sprouted in the last few years, one of the more curious
ones is the fascination with bashing 'bad baby names'. There
are suprisingly large groups of people who spend considerable
amounts of time tracking down, observing, reporting on, and
generally 'trashing,' what they consider to be 'bad baby names.'
First, a few numbers: the biggest
website dedicated
to the cause of ferretting out substandard baby names appears
to be a forum called Big Bad Baby Names. If you look at
their public
statistics, you'll see they are approaching 1.8 million total
posts on their site -- that's right, 1.8 million! That is
one busy forum -- on their busiest day ever, June 25, 2007,
they had 738 users online at the same time!
Now
granted, not
every post, or every thread, on that forum has been devoted
to making fun of other peoples' baby names. But a good number
of them have done so.
Big Bad Baby Names is not
the only site
where you can express your opinions about the legions of kids
with names like Mackenzee, or Jak, or Emalee, or whatever.
There are a number of smaller sites as well, such as the Bad
Baby Names Blog. And the
Bad Baby Names
phenomenon has
now spread to
books, with the publication of not one, but two, Bad Baby
Names books in March, 2008 alone, including Bad
Baby Names by Michael Sherrod, Matthew Rayback, and Joey Gates, and Seriously
Bad Baby Names, by Chris Okum.
And the
media is paying
attention. The
Sherrod book has bagged a
ton of media
attention, including
most impressively,
a Worst Bad Baby
Names Contest
on a blog by the Science Writer for the New
York Times. Certainly,
pre-internet, one or two books on this topic appeared over
the years -- John Train's Remarkable
Names of Real People,
published in 1977, is a classic of the genre. But nothing
from the previous century gave a clue as to the depth of feeling
that many people apparently harbored about other peoples'
weird name choices. It's as if thousands of people were just
waiting for the internet to arrive, so they could release
their pent-up feelings about parents who get it wrong.
But
why are people
so fascinated with bad baby names, and in some cases, getting
pretty worked up about it? Are names something that we, as
a society, all have a proprietary interest in? We don't seem
to revel, as a community, in exposing other peoples' bad decorating
choices, or poor taste in dress (celebrities excepted). Why
do we care so much about other peoples' baby name choices?
We don't pretend to know where
this phenomenon comes from. Whatever the reason, there has
never been a better time for you if you are a stickler for
traditional baby names. If you find that names like Ambyre,
Jaylinn, Makenzee, Jordynn, Maricatherine, and Jaymes make
you nostalgic
for the days of Tom, Mary,
and Donald, you
are not alone!
If you think your blood pressure
can take it, here are a few more 'bad baby names', taken from Bad
Baby Names by Sherrod, Rayback, and Gates. The surnames
are included, because often, it's the combination that is
so funny. Butcher Baker; Church Bell; Gamble Moore; Pickle
Parker; Candy Cane; Chicken Lamb; Ima Payn; Dark White; Magenta
Rose, Beetle Bates, Space Buck, and Leo Lion.
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