I've long wondered about the origins of the "creative" name movement.

Recently on one my local TV stations a young man was interviewed about a community project he worked on. His name was pronounced MON.tray.al and the chyron read Montreal.

By all means, people of any race should give their children names that they are happy with. But I do wish that somebody would require that names be spelled in a way that makes if possible for a person to have a reasonable chance at pronouncing the name correctly. It's bad enough that last names are often confusing - we don't need to add to the problem by making first names unintelligible as well.

Ill bet Deontay wants his name pronounced "Dante," and seemingly purposefully obtuse spelling may not always make someone so named stand out in a positive way.

I like this term.

I had a teammate on my college wrestling team who insisted we call him by his self-given nickname: "Thumper." I declined.

That reminds me of one Olympian's name you didn't mention: Queen. She has two sisters, Princess and Empress.

Much like my teammate wanting to be called Thumper, some names are basically a lifelong demand made by someone's parents that I address their daughter as "Empress."

They apparently also have a brother named God Goldin Zig Zag Zig Allah.

Live and let live, but I sort of hope I never meet up with this family because I will have some difficulty addressing them by name with a straight face.

"Distinctive black naming persisted through the centuries; the folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett turned up thousands of such names culling records from 1619 to the mid-1940s, names like Electa, Valantine and Zebedee."

Electa is a Puritan virtue name used by New England colonists and their descendants. Zebedee is a New Testament name, the father of Saint James, the disciple. Valantine just looks like a misspelling.

Parents that give their children silly or stupid names, for whatever reason, are setting them up for years of derision and worse. Parents that choose names with distinctly "ethnic" names may be satisfying some inner sense of racial pride or identity, but they are doing their children no favor.

I saw a letter in The Economist recently in which someone described observing an Ivy League graduation. They didn't hear too many names like those in this article, but they also didn't hear any Krystals or Billy Bobs. Has anybody noticed the names Asian parents tend to give their kids?

I don't like stupid names, or more specifically I don't like it when parents give their children stupid names, particularly nouns and adjectives that really sound silly as names ("Precious?")

Here's that list from the Onion in 1999:

Popular Black Boy Names

Antwan

Dacron

Newport

LaPrell

Popular Black Girl Names

Shawanda

Tomiqua

Propecia

Sinutab

Popular White Boy Names

Cameron

Brandon

Austin

Dakota

Popular White Girl Names

Caitlin

Brianna

Ashleigh

Madison

Popular Asian Girl Names

Sue

Lisa

Michelle

Amy

Popular Asian Boy Names

Michael

Tim

Chris

Rick

Barack Obama

Oprah Winfrey

Condolezza Rice

... and it reveals so much about the celebrities. As if Brangelina's kids won't get enough attention, anyway. I cannot understand why they would saddle their children with such names.

It also wrecks their pretensions to being 'just ordinary folks, really'. No amount of protestations, or appearing in casual jeans, or telling us they like slobbing out in front of the TV of an evening can outweigh the pretensions to grandeur and 'specialness' that you see revealed in the way they name their children: Shiloh, Apple, Lourdes ... Oh please!

To me it seems like they're telling their children 'be special and unusual and a worthwhile extension of how I like to see me ... or else!'

BadReligion, go to for the real scoop: between 1954 through 1998 (with the exception of 1962, when it was second to David), Michael was the most popular name for male babies in the USA. Since 1999, it has been Jacob. As one of the millions of Michaels, I wish my parents had named me Antwan or Priapus or Shevek or just about any name that had a little individuality to it!

I'm a teacher and I spend some time with the first day's rollsheet, writing down each person's name phonetically. And by the end of week one, I don't have any trouble at all pronouncing them. I'm glad people are getting creative!

And just look at how all the people who write letters to Salon and everywhere else on the net sign them!

--December

I've always thought of Electa as a white, more specifically Masonic name. It refers to the "elect lady", in other words the church.

The reality that I see in my Washington, DC workplace every day is a distinct discrimination based on names. I remember with utter shock being introduced to people with incomprehensible names as well as having to put a halt to misogynistic and racist jokes about their names. To suggest that there is no backlash in HR regarding these names is just wrong- I know that there is because I've heard these people disrespected. But from the time I first met Sing Song Pu in elementary school who eventually started calling himself Andy, I've been fascinated by odd names. To realize in the third grade that Leo Lipschitz's name held a special meaning... I can remember literally putting his name and the 4-letter-word together in my mind and realizing that I had a gold mine of taunting ahead of me.

Some spelling has been changed to protect the innocent and myself.

The #1 worst name that seems just fine was a woman named LaTrina. The word Latrine in the military means primitive bathroom and LaTrina, as the guys would say, "is someting Mexicans piss on outside." Racist on two levels and misogynistic. Is this what you want for your daughter? To be the constant butt of jokes?

A teacher I once knew was named Veleeta. There was no possible way to be a teenager not call her Velveeta, or "I'll Eat a Veleeta." I can't even say that Veleeta is a pretty name. And she knew this!

But the worst ones I saw were names completely misspelled. I knew a woman named Alactia whose name was pronounced "Alicia." I knew a woman named Tuesday whose name was mysteriously spelled Tustay, always mispronounced as "Tusty." I knew a guy whose name was, literally, D'onte' or "Dante" but with an apostrophe and accent mark that made his name look like Homer Simpson's D'Oh.

I knew a woman named Diamonique who suffered because that was QVC's name for phony diamonds. I heard about someone's cousin named Firene (?) who was looking for a job after getting fired. I also heard about someone's cousin reportedly named Echelle but whose name was pronounced almost exactly like Eggshell so that when this woman would say, "Talk to you later Eggshell" someone invariably would stop and ask what the hell her aunt was thinking. Last but not least I worked with a woman named Tonawanda which her supervisor joked was "the armpit of Buffalo, NY."

The worst white name I've heard, in comparison, was someone's young niece named Traylor (trailer!), but the parents realized that mistake and started calling her Taylor.

After 10 years of working in an African-American community that saddled its young with names that would serve to make them the laughingstock of office break rooms and delegate them to NEVER getting off that front desk phone duty, I gave my children two saint's names and figured they'd make a name for themselves. The African-American woman I was best friends with at one office did the same, bucking the trend that she saw as a marginalizing influence in Black Life- HER exotic name for her daughter was Leah, from the bible.

I have yet to meet anyone with one of those illiterate names that didn't have trouble with them. Uniformly the women I've met with those names went nowhere in our companies. Racist people exist and to give someone a name that invites racist ridicule from even mildly conservative people is just handicapping them for life.