Complaint Box | Brittney, Brittny, Brittneigh

[The Straight Story]

Complaint Box | Brittney, Brittny, Brittneigh


I saw a birth announcement the other day and groaned. In recent years, I’d learned to accept the flood of trendy tots named Madison, but this was my first Madicyn. If you care about spelling, my advice is to pour yourself a stiff drink before untying that pink or blue ribbon and reading news of the blessed event.

In a similar vein, leafing through the newspaper these days is like crawling through a minefield of makeshift names. An article will catch my eye — say, something about a tornado that just missed ripping through a preschool beauty pageant — and I dread what’s coming next. They’re going to interview the pint-size witnesses, and I’m about to meet little Brittney, Brittny, Brittneigh, Brit’nee, Brittani and Bryttney. If you absolutely have to name your child after a rugged French peninsula, then get out a dictionary and look it up. It’s Brittany.

I have a major gripe with the trend of misspelling baby names. On purpose. The parents’ logic runs something like this: “My child is special and unique. Thus, my child deserves a special, uniquely spelled name.” The upshot is that Chloe becomes Kloey, and Jacqueline metastasizes into something ghastly, like Jaq’leen.

It would be easy to blame this on celebrities, since there appears to be an unspoken contest among them to saddle children with awful names. Gwyneth Paltrow set the bar high when she named her daughter Apple, but not high enough. Reign Beau, daughter of Ving Rhames, and Vanilla Ice’s Dusti Rain and Keelee Breeze are way up there. For boys, could any name be worse than Bronx Mowgli, son of Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz? Perhaps Jermajesty Jackson?

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/complaint-box-brittney-brittny-brittneigh/

[asdjrocky]

1. My sisters a labor and delivery nurse.

She's has told me some amazing names. My current favorite is Precious Diamond.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. For connoisseurs of bad baby names, here's a website for you

http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/

Snide, but sometimes hilarious put-downs of people who want to name their kids after soap opera characters or use "creative" spelling.

[smokey nj]

4. I was just going to post this link! There's some laugh-out-loud funny

stuff there.

[MinneapolisMatt]

3. From Facebook:

MY SISTER SAID IF I GET ONE MILLION FANS SHE WILL NAME HER BABY MEGATRON

There are 1,738,043 fans.

:beer:

[nickinSTL]

5. heh.

If parents really want to give a kid a unique name, dig out a damn baby-name book, or Google baby names and pick something really unique, like Anaximander or something. Misspelling the name du jour isn't unique, it's stupid, IMO.

[LibDemAlways]

6. Years ago there was a kid named Arpad in a class

I was teaching. His parents thought they were honoring their heritage by naming him after an historical Hungarian prince. What they were unwittingly doing was subjecting him to the merciless taunting of his classmates who constantly croaked his name as though it were being said by a frog. It was awful.

As a person who suffered with an ethnic name in a world of Debbies and Nancys (back in the 50's), I can say from experience that mainstream - any name that doesn't call undue attention to itself - is best.

[rrneck]

7. Useless affectation is bad enough.

Poorly thought out, cheap, easy useless affectation is several orders of magnitude worse.

If you want your kid to have an interesting name, make it the middle name.

John Poindexterolium Smith.