I’m all for unique and clear identifiers for everything, including people, but jesus christ, imagine yourself in elementary school having a weird name. Why would parents choose a hard mode for their progeny?
I’m a big proponent of normal/semi obscure normal first name, weird middle name. John W Smith if you work in sales, J Wolfgang Smith if you’re an author. Perfect compromise.
It’s a pretty common practice where I live for a kid to be named after someone for their first name, but go by their middle name. So I think it’s perfectly fine to have one normal name and one weird name in any order.
A. John Smith is an accountant. Atreyu J. Smith is a musician who wears leather pants and some sort of studded headband.
We gave our daughter a somewhat disused but normal and formerly not uncommon name which was the name of a plant. We just wanted a name that wasn’t religious but still normal enough that she wouldn’t get bullied for it (she got bullied anyway). We realized later that it actually made sense in terms of her ancestry because her mother has a plant name, her grandmother has a plant name and her great-grandmother had a plant name. One long lineage of plant names.
a somewhat disused but normal and formerly not uncommon name which was the name of a plant
Describing it like that makes it really tempting to try and guess the name. Out of respect for your and her privacy, I won’t, though.
Dude I see you around here on the regular, so I’ll mention that this is ironic for me to read this, because we also named our daughter an old, obscure but “real” name that is also a plant (a flower, specifically).
It’s from France, so I asked a French friend before using it if it was ok to use and not a weird name, and they said “sure it’s ok, but it’s like an old grandma’s name no one uses anymore.” And that’s when I knew it was the one!
Let me introduce you to Marijuana Pepsi:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marijuana_Pepsi_Vandyck
The kicker is her parents and siblings have normal names.
In the fall of 2019, Vandyck sponsored the Marijuana Pepsi Scholarship for first-generation African-American students at UW–Whitewater.
If someone with a brand name… name… starts a same-industry business in their name, or offers a scholarship for nazis, I wonder what kind of recourse the original brand has.
Imagine you’re a seven years old little fat kid and your name is Leviathan
