...as in Cotton Mather, one of the WASP-iest antecedents in American genealogy. I suppose the modern-day version would be Nylon.

I'm kind of disturbed by all the letters chortling about the ignorance of black parents who burden their children with such hideous names. At least the names are evocative. Lower-middle-class white people give their children similarly awful, but dull, stodgy names apparently lifted from soap operas.

Or, in the case of girls, the names are excessively feminine creations and often misspelled, and I wince when I hear of a Jayleena or a KayCee (intercaps intentional). And who can ever forget JonBenet? What the hell kind of name was that?

Incidentally, speaking of Samantha, another such made-up name whose origins appear respectably shrouded in the mists of time is Vanessa. As in Vanessa Redgrave, or Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf's half-sister). It was Jonathan Swift's nickname for his young mistress, Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he immortalized in the narrative poem "Cadenus and Vanessa."

My first name is very much a family name (common as it is!) My great-grandmother, my grandmother, three cousins, and I all have the same first name, and most of us go by the same nickname. It's a rare event that all of us are in the same room at the same time (especially given that my ggm and gm are both dead), so when that happens we are all called "firstnamelastname" as if it's one name.

Thanks for not doing your research, and proving that you are just another ignorant westerner, who has no regard for other cultures of the world. The name 'Ogonna' is NOT the made-up "creative name" you falsely claim it to be. The name actually originates from the Igbo ethnic group in southeastern Nigeria, and it means "father-in-law". Ogonna's parents are not African-American, they are Nigerian immigrants. More than likely, Ogonna's mother named him after her husband's father, who she was probably very close to, but tiny little fact probably won't stand in the way of you making stupid generalizations.

My husband's very WASP family named all of their first born daugther's "Elizabeth." It doesn't matter how many of the cousins are also named "Elizabeth." They just give every one of them ridiculous nicknames: Betz, Boots, Buffy, Bethy...

My younger brother and Iwere both ridiculed in school because of our "White"names.As if having a ghetto name is a source of pride.We both have never had trouble getting high-paying jobs.

Although the stories associated with such names are often apocraphyl, there are people with such names whose parents either thought the names sounded interesting, or had some long standing cultural tie to the name.

There are no known confirmed accounts of "ignorant" folk using a common word or phrase (or a bastardization there of) as a name for a child because they thought it sounded nice.

Certain Affectaions are not unheard of (such as a numerical refernce to a name without a famly predecessor, or the use of initials with no actual name attached)in many poorer communities, but such affectations are also very rare, and not unheard of in other communities as well.

What is much more common is recent imigrants, or people in a culturaly segregated community giving their children normal enough names in their community that have a coincidental sound to a common word or phrase in the American dialect. Of Course however, Mike Hunt has the same problem.

In such situations, often ingnorant americans will concoct a sotry to explain such strange names ususally centered around the ignorant "other".

Then again you have the old Bomanicious story, in which the misunderstanding of the name and it's application is related to the oblivious white, and is not related to the name itself.

In that story a woman asks her long time odd job man if she can pay him with a check, but isn't sure how to spell Bomanicious. To whit he responds "Madame when I first worked with you, I told you my name, and how to spell it, but then I informed you that you could just as easily refer to me By My Initials".

It was not uncommon (infact was quite common on Elis Island) for men and women to present their proper names to American workers who happily scribbled down bastardized spellings and misheard pronunciations of common respectable names, and such things occur no doubt to this day.

We're white - American of English descent - and my sister and I were both given ususual names. My parents each had very common names, and they always hated being one of 5 or 6 people in the same class/office/church/etc with the same name. So...they decided to be creative with us. My sister has only met 2 other people with her name (both white as well), and I've only met one other woman with my name (who happened to be African-American). I wasn't too fond of my name as a kid, but now as a 31-year old, I really like it. There aren't 5 other people in my office with my name, and it just sounds cool. However, much to our parents' credit, our names are pretty easy to spell and pronounce. Spelling and pronunciation are the biggest problems associated with most unusual names, like some of the ones mentioned in the article. When parents saddle a kid with a name that always gets misspelled or mispronounced, they're just not doing their kid any favors.

This article was pretty funny to me just because my husband and I are in the process of trying to name our baby daughter, who will be born in a few months. We're of different ethnicities and from different countries. So...finding a name that both our families can easily spell and prounounce AND that is unique without being ridiculous is a challenege! I'll have to think back to this article and figure out whether any of our choices fit squarely in the WTF category!!

My previous title should, of course, contain the word "cited", not "sited".

Dr. Condoleeza Rice's first name is a corruption of "con dolcezza" ("with sweetness" or "with gentleness"). An appropriate name for a woman with her background as a classically-trained pianist, perhaps, but still rather unfortunate in its corrupt spelling.

I think perhaps much of the derision aimed at exotic-sounding African-American names does not pertain to what may be a name's genuine origins in, say, Islam--although many do find bizarre and even laughable the attempt to attach oneself to a tradition or belief system with which one has had no real connection via a name that you're told "means" something in that tradition. I think it has more to do with analogues of those names--the ones that, in short, are made up. Names that "sound" profound, ancient or significant when they're nothing of the sort give many people a giggle. That's just the way it is.

There is a venerable Puritan / Calvinist / American low-church tradition of giving children names like (to pick on a couple of leaders in one organisation currently popular in the American fundamentalist community) Honour, Justice, Triumph, Perseverance--no, as Dave Barry would say, I'm not making this up--and Jubilee. Frankly, I laugh my Irish arse off at these, too, just as I often do at the phenomenon of people of Irish descent giving their children names that are so Irish, they spend the rest of their lives explaining the pronunciation of those names to North Americans. But at least, in these cases, the names do truly mean something, and may once have been common. But it's still funny.

Our desperate belief in each individual's uniqueness--a subtle, nuanced, delicate thing, individuality--inevitably bumps up against the fact that we are so very like most of those around us, and against the fact that we are mortal. It seems nearly impossible to root oneself in the world in any way that is lasting or meaningful, and the harder one's lot in life, the more acute this dilemma may seem, even for those who do not or cannot articulate it this way. The anxiety over this reality often trumps taste, discretion and so-called common sense when it comes to one of the first things we impose on new human beings--names.