File under “Names, Unfortunate”
Kasia February 27th, 2007
This has to be quick, because I’m at my other job right now, but this struck me and I just had to post it. I’m going through a pile of papers, verifying contact information against what’s in the computer, and occasionally doing a WhitePages.com search to check a phone number. (WhitePages.com is a little creepy, by the way, but that’s a post for another day.)
Anyway, and I can post this because it wasn’t one of our clients, someone popped up with the same last name as the client I was looking for. Her first name? Moronia.
Eeek. I mean, I’m sure she’s a lovely lady, and it would be a lovely name if it didn’t have that…singularly unfortunate association. But eeek.
This is why, if I ever have kids, I’m cross-referencing their names against as many languages as I can think of. It’s kind of like the Greeks protesting the EU’s decision to name their monetary unit the “euro” because, in Greek, it takes on a second (not very favorable) connotation. Only this is worse, because it’s a human being, not a unit of currency.
I can’t imagine what she went through in junior high school.
I swear this is true.
Some years ago, my friend called to tell my her new son’s name.
“Orion?” I asked, thinking I had not heard rightly.
“No, Arrayan.” (Pronounced Uh-RYE-ann)
“Your child is hafl-Black. You are in white supremacist country. Why are you naming him this?? Everyone will call him Aryan. It won’t be good.”
“We’ll just call him Ryan, anyway.”
I couldn’t dissuade her. I pray to God the kid never sees his birth certificate…
Oh dear.
One of my favorite boy’s names is Jude, but I will not name my child that because of what it would mean in German. (”Jude” is German for “Jew” – not that there’s anything wrong with it, but there’s enough extant anti-Semitism in central Europe for me to settle definitively against the name.)
Aryan. Oh dear, dear, dear.