Why the fashion for stupid names.

[ceecee32]

Can someone please explain to me why on earth there is the need to saddle your poor children with a stupid name which will affect them for the rest of their life.

Is there a competition somewhere to have the most ridiculous thing that can be thought of.....why???

Most people would expect a Darren or Tracy to be over 50, and would be surprised if they were schoolkids

Granted I'm not most people but it wouldn't surprise me, at least not Darren

Peta is a real name. It's Native American in origin.

Theymishear and Bendy: generations of men in my family tree were called Avery though it has died out.

Some that I don't like, without calling them stupid, are Hunter, Cody, Brody, Tanner, Shane, Cole, Riley, Carter, Teagan, Vaughan, Brandon, Carver, Bailey, Colten... and that's just for boys.

I just asked DD (7), what the most unusual name in her class was. She said Vanessa. Times change!

However Sir is a stupid name. Blue Ivy is different and I wouldn't. Rumi is different and cute. Sir is just giving the kid idea on how much more important he is

@lazycrazyhazy Theymishear and Bendy: generations of men in my family tree were called ...

For one worrying second I really thought the next word in this sentence was going to be "this"

Well, Lucky Blue Smith and his girlfriend Stormi Bree didn't disappoint. They have apparently called their baby girl Gravity.

Who says silly names get you nowhere in life?

There will always been exceptions, but I've never seen a Nikita or a Chantelle in higher management or excelling in academia

I don't know any Chantelles but I do know a Nikita who got a first in his degree and is doing very well in his working life. Although he is Russian so maybe that makes a difference.

I do judge when I hear absurd or yoonique spellings of perfectly normal names but I keep my judging to myself - I would never tell a parent what i thought of their child's name.

My ds and dd have fairly normal names, but I wanted unusual ones as my own name was the most popular ever, there were 11 of us in our year at school.
However in ds nursery, there is an Oberon (cant decide whether I like it or not) and a Levi, which is definitely a guard dogs name!

Oberon is kinda cool. Its on the list of names that make me go ooooh but which I haven't the guts for.

I adore Titana though.

I really wanted twin girls Tatiana and Anastasia

MrWriter
Uummm actually Levi is a bible name

Leviticus is much cooker to yell across the school yard

I know it is of religious background, but the only Levi's I've met before have been Rottweilers or Alsatians! Or the denim variety.

Levi is a common Jewish name...

What vintage does a name have to be to be considered acceptable? Biblical? Middle-ages? Victorian? Or is it popularity that makes something acceptable to you OP? That's a bit cowardly.
All names were ridiculous once. Don't be afraid of the new.
Vanessa was a made up name in a novel. Expect people were thoroughly scathing of that one at first.

It's not so much the vintage as the adoption into general use. Have you seen the Horrible Histories sketch about Victorian names that didn't make it?

Innovations that make people go 'how lovely' (not WTAF) are more likely to catch on, I think.

There is definitely a class element to some names and I think it important not to sneer at or judge people for their name or their choice of baby name. I personally dislike creative spellings and am not at all a fan of many of the current name trends like obscure Bible or granny chic but that just means I don't choose them for my baby.

However, I make an exception to my live-and-let-live philosophy for a name discussed early in this thread, StJohn. It appears to me to be a name designed to exclude. There is no way you can tell it is pronounced Sinjin unless somebody has told you and it is a clear way of excluding or marking out people who don't have the cultural capital to know this. Up until very recently, if I saw that was someone's name, I would say it as "Saint John" and be embarrassed to be corrected to the mysterious Sinjin. I can't think of any other name like it that so completely disregards spelling rules and is used in my view as a clear class signifier.

St Clair.

I quite like the name St John, but I'll not forget my friend, who has a habit of reading things to me from the newspaper, saying "Saint John, what sort of a silly name is that?".

A child given a name that usually generates a negative response will have a lifetime of people saying "You're joking" and worse when they tell people their name.

Persephone sycamore?

Yes, Persephone and many of the greek names especially, people don't seem to know how to pronounce (Greek is easy if you know the 'rules')

St John. I suppose you'd have had to have seen a Jane Eyre play, or the film, (in addition to having read the book) to know how to pronounce, if you hadn't been told at some point. I can't think of any others offhand, though there was a St John in Dance to the Music of Time, I think it was called ( novels and series)

I adore PERSEPHONE and a friend of a friend named her daughter it but she's poach. Where I live I'd have some kid asking if purse-and-phone could come and play and I'd have a MN thread about me

The poor fool who thought that by calling her poor dd Suicide meant she was "reclaiming" the word (reclaiming it as what? It means what it's always meant) is in dire need of therapy

They might have had difficulties registering Suicide as a name if in the UK. The registrar does have some limited powers to refuse certain names, and I think this would be one of them.