Bad, Hilarious, Or Just Absurd Baby Names

I'm reminded in a way of a girl I went to middle school with. She was from the Ukraine, and had immigrated to the US relatively recently--I think a few years before, tops. And her name was one with two potential spellings--Eugenia or Yevhenia--and just her luck, she ended up saddled with the latter when she moved to the States, and no one knew how to pronounce it at all. (She was already going by Jane by the time I met her.) Obviously that's not a case of a name being bad in another language per se, but yeah.

In terms of actually-wtf names, I met a baby a few months back named Jezebel. She was a twin, IIRC, and her brother's name was something completely normal.

 

Of course it's Australia.

I was thinking that they called them jandals like us, but nope, they're the people who call them thongs! Because Australia!

(mock irritation at Australia)

 

I mean, we call them flip-flops here in California. I've never heard "jandals" outside of the jorts meme.

 

Jandals is the New Zealand word for that type of sandal.

 

Guy in my high school class' last name was Bottomley-Clapp. God alone knows why the name was hyphenated, since either of them would have been all right on their own. As it is, I told my mom his full name once and she went red from trying not to laugh.

 

I knew I guy in middle school who was the child of Polish immigrants. His first name was Krzysztof, which was unfortunate in that we were all terrible children (though at least half of us made an earnest effort to learn how to say it, even if he just threw his hands up and asked us to call him Kris) but even more unfortunately, his last name was Krol and his middle name also began with K. So Kris K. Krol.

Whoops.

 

In first grade there was a kid in my class named Forrest Hunter. When his family went hunting in the fall there was no end to the jokes

 

My mom knew a Forrest Rose. Poor guy.

 

There was another kid whose name I can't decide if it's bad name or best name: Cannon King

 

A name I just saw, apparently that of a photographer: Cludes Tomato.

 

I've heard them called thongs in the US but that was more than 20 years ago.

My name is Kiri. It's Japanese. It means fog. Written differently it can also mean a sort of tree. In Farsi however it means "penis".

THAT was embarrassing.

 

My grandfather's first name was C.B.. Not short for anything, just C.B.. I'm not sure my mom ever got them to do his headstone right...

I can't WAIT for kiddo to start school so I can make faces at all the other parents as they introduce their children

 

A childhood friend of mine named her kid Iowa. I get that place name names are a thing, I guess, but Iowa is a...weird choice of location to name a kid after. Especially for someone who has never left the UK. Except, she's not really named after the state... she's named after the Slipknot album ????????

I also grew up with a kid named River Banks, which was funny as a kid but seems sort of tame now.

 

There is apparently someone at my university named Crystal Rainwater

 

You're in Oregon, that's cheating :P

 

Yeah but not that part of Oregon:P

 

There are quite a few hippies sprinkled across the NE part of the state. Unless something has changed drastically in the time since I moved away, [University] keeps a certain amount of weirdness going in the area.

 

I went to middle school with a guy named Nebula. I never learned his last name. 8th grade and he was already a stoner, iirc

 

Oh no!

My mom was from (what is now) Slovenia and my name was going to be Klavdija until she got cold feet about giving me a slavic-sounding name. She wound up giving me a name that didn't suit me and nobody called me and mostly just led to paperwork hassles until I got the thing legally changed in my 20's.

I've never had the heart to ask her why she didn't just name me Claudia.

 

I met a Chinese girl named Dorcas (pronounced dorkus).

My friend knew knew someone whose last name was Junebug so they named their daughter Ima.

If I'd been born male I would have been named Benjamin Franklin.