People Are Stupid Redux

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Apparently a lot of pretension. Like naming your kid Unique. To date, there are 228 Americans with this not-so-unique moniker. There's even the inevitable misspelled Uneek and Uneqqee (which I guess makes a Unique more unique!).

Let's face it, anybody can breed - just look at baby daddy Michael Jackson or any of the trailer park trash on COPS - and no one offspring is more special than another, regardless of what name they go by. As comedian Bill Hicks observed, there are roughly 200 million sperm in every guy's average ejaculation, so how special is any one graduate in a class that big - especially given that because Boys will be Boys, they tend to recreationally wipe out the statistical equivalent of a whole civilization in a single jerkoff session. And yet people continue to christen their newborn progeny with names that imply they are somewhat different or 'mo better than your average Tom, Dick or Harriet.

BAD NAMING SHOULD BE A FELONY

In an article in today's Baltimore Sunpaper, I learned that experts can tell when you were born from your first name. Thus, you can tell that all of my siblings were born in the late 40s and 50s, because they had names like Thomas, William and Nancy - all names in the Top 10 list for that era (no wonder there used to be so much confusion at get-togethers with my family and in-laws - everybody of our generation was a Tom or a Bill and I even had a girlfriend named Nancy who was, bingo, the same age as my sister, leading to even more confusion). These rather vanilla names showed an inclination toward names of saints and apostles and secular Anglo-Saxon stock. Likewise, Gen Xers tend to have very pretentious TV star yuppie names like Taylor, Tyler, and Madison. Even Noah (which sounds Biblical but is no doubt inspiried by TV hunk Noah Wylie). There's also a trend toward either/or names like Mackenzie, Wallis/Wallace, which are variations on the genderless phenomena of names likes Chris, Kim, Pat. Call me old school, but I like names that I can look at on paper and know right away if the person is male or female. (Sorry parents, it IS all about me and my convienience!)

Anyway, my favorite part of the article was about the Mother of All Pop Culture-Influenced Bad Naming, one Mary Maslow of Reisterstown, MD, who combined the worst aspects of Hippiedom and Geekdom in naming her four kids as follows: Crystal Dawn ("because she was our 'clear beginning'"); Jed Ian ("because we're Star Wars fans we called him 'Jedi'" - Jed I., get it?); Iris Gem (because her fave flower is the Iris and because "Gem was an empath on an early episode of Star Trek"); and finally Luke Dalton (an unholy union of "Luke" Skywalker from from Star Wars and Patrick Swayze's bouncer character "Dalton" from Road House).

Makes me almost glad I'm a vanilla Tom...a Tomcat, a Tom Tom the Piper's Son, a member of the Tom Tom Club, a Tommy Gun, a pinball wizard deaf dumb and blind kid Tommy (can ya hear me?), and an Uncle Tom.