Saturday, February 11, 2006

It Does Matter and it is a Big Deal!

A conversation with Girlfiend has prompted me to write a quick guide for anyone attempting to name a human being. Naming a person is entirely different from naming a pet or a plant or a car. I find it perfectly acceptable that my dog's name is Augustus Mortimer. It's fitting for a regal beagle like himself. But children? Children will be judged their whole lives upon the name that you give them. And if you go and do something weird to it, like spell it all funky or adding an extra letter to give it flair, you've gone and messed up your kid in school. I can promise you that their teacher will look at it on their roster and laugh. Then they will assume that you, as the parent, are either uneducated or weird. It just makes you seem less intelligent to mess up your child's name.
I once taught an Ashle. It's not rocket science to slap a "y" on the end of that same to prevent it from being ASH-EL. The name Emily should not be spelled Emalie. That's just dumb. Biron? Zackari? Also dumb. I know that's just my opinion, but I happen to think it's a good one.
I would also like to make people aware of some names with stigma. Now, I'm not saying all people with these names are going to have these problems, but I'm just pointing out that I have noticed a suspicious pattern in my particular world over the last eight years.
We will make it simple. These names are just generally a bad idea: Brandon, William/Will/Willy/Billy, Austin, Brittany/Britney, Jacob, Zachary, Rebecca/Rebekah, or Heavy D. Of these names, I have found that Brandons, Wills, Zacharys and Heavy D's tend to be the worst. Girls names don't seem to follow quite the pattern that boy's names have in my experience, except for Brittany. I've never taught a nice one. And if you're wondering? I've only taught one Heavy D, but he was bad enough to add him to the list. When I met Heavy D for the first time the conversation went like this:
Me: Hi! Welcome to 4th grade, De'Andre!
Mom: He go by Heavy D.
Me: OooooOOOOOoooooh!
Mom: Go on, D. [nudge]
Then he began wreaking havoc on my classroom. So you can see that these opinions are based on vast research and depth of reasoning. I just wanted to put that out there. Did I miss any names?

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