The Name Game
During my 25 years on this earth, I've encounted a lot of strange things, but perhaps none are so strange as the seemingly inexplicable names that some parents choose to burden their children with. How hateful must a parent be to scar their child right out of the womb?
I'm not necessarily talking about things like "Billy Jo Bobbie Sue", although that is a stupid name indeed, with the recipient having either a 50% chance of being a gender-confused hermaphrodite serial killer or the next guest on the Jerry Springer show ("Women who saw the face of Jesus in their velvet Elvis! Don't miss it!"). Or both. I'm talking about people with names that would never turn up in a baby book.
Behold the spark that lit this particular flame. A woman in Mississippi (I know! I was shocked to find these things flowing from such an upstanding state too!) with a rather unusual name. A name so unusual, I couldn't figure out how to spell it, so I asked her to do so.
The name? Margarine.
Oh, of course, she tried to dress it up and make it sound fancy. "Mar-jar-EEN", she said with an air of dignity that a person named after a dairy product just shouldn't be allowed to possess. Honey, any way you butter it, it's "Parkay".
She's not the first person I've encountered with a name like this either. One of the people I used to go to school with was named "Formica Linoleum".
It gets worse. Take the twins, "Leh-mahnge-elo" and "Oh-rahnge-elo". Or perhaps you'd more commonly know them as "Lemonjello" and "Orangejello".
If only I were making this up.
I suppose it's better for whatever child I may produce in the future that I simply cannot understand the reasoning behind this. I'm a bit strapped for original baby names myself, but I sure as hell wouldn't go shopping one day at Albertsons for potentials.
"Look, sweetie, that's it! The perfect name! We'll call her 'Vagisil'!" (Prounounded "Vah-gee-sile", of course.)
Hell, if you MUST go shopping and make those important life decisions at the same time, at least save it for when you're waiting in the check-out line. I think that must be why they have all those stacks of digest books (with at least 20 different versions on baby names), to stop these stupid parents from stacking the deck against their kid before it has a chance to fuck up all on its own.
