Warning Explicit Language Contained Herein

Stupid Names

At a Kenneth Cole in Bethesda a few months back, I had the pleasure of meeting a very attractive young black woman working the sales floor. Very tall, very well-built, assertive yet soft-spoken, and ambitious enough to be pursuing an advanced degree without being a dick about it. I was damn near ready to marry this girl on the spot.

Then she told me her name. “La La."

This was her actual ******g name. It wasn’t a nickname. It wasn’t her middle name. It wasn’t her name in Sanskrit. I’m sorry to say it, but the conversation pretty much ended there. Assuming things got serious, there’s no way I’m introducing to my mother a chick whose name doubles as a drug-induced slur. I’d rather be keelhauled.

Figure 1: Lala is a clam, not a name.

The incident got me thinking about all the ridiculous names of black people I’ve come across in my lifetime, and exactly why the **** these childrens’ parents would do something so socially damning as to name their child something like ‘Sugar’ or ‘Heaven’ or ‘Knoshawn’.

Any parent who gives their child a ridiculous name is dooming that child to failure in more ways than they could possibly fathom. It will inhibit your life professionally, socially, romantically, and even physically*

* I have a cousin who, upon meeting people named after luxury cars (e.g. Mercedes, Lexus, etc.), takes a blood oath to ram them whilst driving their namesake automobile. He sincerely believes this will restore balance to the universe, and so do I.

In analyzing this cultural disease, it became apparent that stupid black names fall under four major categories (listed in decreasing order of popularity):

1. Swahili *******izations
2. Megalomaniacal Descriptors
3. Luxury Latch-Ons
4. The Unfathomably Ridiculous

I will address these in turn.

Swahili *******izations

During the waning years of the Civil Rights Movement, black people all over the country decided to rebel against the dominant society by rejecting typical white (slave) names and adopting names closer to our own roots. The natural choice was, then, to adopt African names – but it wasn’t quite that simple. African Americans have a natural distrust of actual Africans…so we wanted to give our children names that sounded like they were from the mother continent, but wouldn’t make people think our children were actually African. It all went downhill from here.

Swahili names (taken from eastern and central Africa and typically applied to girls) and Arabic names (taken from north Africa and typically applied to boys) became ferociously popular – but for some reason many parents felt the need to mutate the Swahili names. So while boys received unaltered Arabic names like Ahmad and Kareem, girls were nominally punched in the uterus with senseless names like Shanequa and Shaquan. Parents to this day insist on naming their girls this way, despite the knowledge that doing so dooms their child to being perceived thusly by the population at large.

Figure 2: Not one of them is named ‘Laquesha’

Megalomanical Descriptors

Again, girls were the ones *****ally took it up the ass when it suddenly became popular to name children **** like ‘Pleasure’, ‘Heaven’, and ‘Serenity’. I can only assume that the parents think they’ll be the only people who ever call the child by her first name – daddies all over the world call their little girls ‘Precious’ without a second thought. But this logic is horrendously flawed, and akin to a girl legally changing her name to ‘Baby’, ‘Sweetheart’, or ‘Boo’ because that’s how her boyfriend addresses her.

Note to all prospective parents: nothing makes people more uncomfortable than having to address a complete ******g stranger as ‘Precious’ – and yes, to 99.99999999999999% of the world, your kid will be a stranger with an insufferable ******g name. Call your child all the pet names you want, but please leave it off the goddamn birth certificate.

Figure 3: Less awkward than a kid named ‘Treasure’

Luxury Latch-Ons

For whatever reason, black parents all over the country decided that naming their children after expensive things would bode good fortune for them throughout their lives. Consequently, there are legions of unfortunate people (mostly girls, again) with names like Chanel, Mercedes, Chandelier, and even Prada (yes, I did meet a girl named Prada, and it was the worst day of my life.)

I have personally never met someone with an LL-O name that made more than $10 an hour – so all these parents are really doing is pigeon-holing their kids into careers that will always involve a name tag and the omnipresent threat of a grease fire. Take a look at the names of the richest people in North America, and you’ll quickly realize that simplicity is the key.

Kid Named ‘Lexus’ ∩ Success = ø

The Unfathomably Ridiculous

This is where the men finally get it…and as far as I’m concerned it makes up for the fact that girls bear the brunt of the first three categories. UR names span the gamut from gross misspellings of common names (e.g. Anfernee) to those that could only be the result of massive head trauma (e.g. Oranjello)

Interestingly, though, UR names seem to be the only ones that actually correlate with financial success in life. If you need proof, take a look at the roster for any team in the NBA and you’ll find at least half a dozen dudes with a UR name. So the names are stupid, but if it works….then hey….

Figure 4: Stupid name **** it.

Aside: Asian People

Being friends with a lot of Asian people has taught me that Asians just LOVE to make fun of the names black people give to their children – which is about the worst case of the pot calling the kettle black that I could possibly imagine. Our names may be ridiculous, but your entire languages are ****** up. Give me enough milk and beans, and I can say any word in Vietnamese with my butt.

Figure 5: At least one of these people is named Long Truc ****

You and Lee are killing me with these names. I found this article that has a few doosies in it.

And the Worst Bad Name Is . . .

We have a winner in the Worst Bad Name Contest. And after talking to the woman who has this name, I’m happy to report we have new anecdotal evidence to go with the psychological studies supporting the Boy Named Sue theory: good things can indeed come from a bad name.

It wasn’t easy picking a winner from more than 1,000 entries. Besides Charman Toilette, an early favorite of the judges, there was Chastity Beltz, Wrigley Fields, Justin Credible, Tiny Bimbo, and a girl whose father was an auto mechanic but somehow didn’t realize he was effectively giving her the name of a tire: Michele Lynn. There were girls named Chaos and Tutu, and boys named Clever, Cowboy, Crash, Felony, Furious and Zero. There was Unnamed Jones (pronounced you-NAH-med). There was Brook Traut and his daughter, Rainbow. There were more names involving genitalia than the judges cared to count. (Memo to parents: Carefully consider your surname before naming a boy Harry or Richard.)

The grand prize, a copy of “Bad Baby Names," by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback, goes to Kate, a Lab reader who nominated a fellow resident of the Cleveland area: Iona Knipl. The judges chose it because, in addition to being an embarrassing pun, it also set up an inevitable reply from people imagining they were being wittily original. I called up Miss Knipl and asked her how many times she had heard someone meet her and reply, “I own two."

“I got sick of hearing it, but what can you do?" Miss Knipl said. “My mother never thought about that when she was naming me. It was her mother’s name. I came home from school a couple times crying and my mother said, ‘Oh, why did I do that?’ but it had never occurred to her how people would hear the name."

Miss Knipl shed the pun when she got married and began using her husband’s last name. But then, after they were divorced, she went right back to her old name. It might have simpler to keep her husband’s name, she told me, but by this time she had come to appreciate the advantages of Iona Knipl.

“In school it bothered me, but now I think it’s neat," she said. “It’s different."

I’m glad to hear that her story, like Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue," has a happy ending — in fact, I wonder now if I should have called it the Best Bad Name Contest. Iona Knipl’s experience jibes with the psychological research I cited in my Findings column, and with the opinion of experts like Cleveland Evans, a psychologist at Bellevue University in Nebraska and a past president of the American Names Society. Dr. Evans says that while he’d advise against certain names — he once pleaded with a woman not to name her daughter Tyranny — there’s plenty of anecdotal and scientific evidence that children turn out fine.

“Both Ima Hogg and Shanda Lear seem to have done very well with their names," he told me, referring to the daughters of a Texas governor and the founder of Lear Jet. “I think the biggest factor in whether such a name negatively impacts a child would be the overall nature of their relationship with their parents. If the child has a warm and loving relationship with the name-giver, the name will probably be shrugged off as a minor nuisance and a conversation piece."