Thank heaven they didn’t listen. I am SO not a Judy.

Our family name is “Dang” (which is a fairly uncommon Vietnamese surname). It’s actually not pronounced the way most Americans think it is, but everyone pronounces it just like the slang term, which is actually unfortunate, because I went through A LOT of teasing and ridicule as a child in a predominantly white town.

Fortunately, my parents named my middle sister and I (the oldest) normal sounding American names. Unfortunately for my youngest sister, they decided that they were tired of American names and so opted to give her a Vietnamese name that was easy for non-Vietnamese to spell and pronounce–”Mai”. Much “Ouch, Mai Dang (insert body part)” jokes ensued throughout school.

http://volokh.com/posts/1217543857.shtml

However, I’m going to side with the judge and assume that he had the best interests of the girl at heart, as most family court judges do.

Perhaps it’s because my father stated that someone should take my one-week-old infant away and bottlefeed him until my milk dried up, because he (father) thinks breastfeeding is “disgusting.” Or maybe it’s just the liberal in me. In any event, the whole idea of someone seizing legal control over a child because something about that child’s upbringing is distasteful to him or her personally, that rankles.

I don’t know enough about the case to make an iron-clad statement about it – for instance, was the girl’s distress part of the dispute, or did it only come up later? Why on earth would a judge sitting on a custody hearing take an action that had – as far as I can see – nothing to do with custody, but apparently only with the judge’s personal sensibilities? Did the girl perhaps take advantage of the court presence and, I assume, a guardian ad litem/”friend of the court” to mention, “By the way, this name thing…” at which point she was made a ward of the court and an attorney assigned to her? Or was it, as the stories make it sound, simply the judge’s disgust and a happy coincidence that the girl was also unhappy with her name? If the girl had found her name delightfully quirky, would it still have been ordered changed? Everything I’ve read has indicated that it was the judge’s call, but “hey, it’s okay because the girl was unhappy with her name anyway.” Which makes the ending happy for all concerned, but still doesn’t make it right, IMO.

I don’t know any of those things, so I can’t argue a hard line in any direction. All I’m taken aback at is the notion that a judge can, during an apparently unrelated matter, seize custody of a child simply because he doesn’t like her name and wants to have it changed, for his own level of comfort/social mores.

Second, to Jennie, although Loo Phuc or Ali Baba might sound “punitive” to your (presumably Western) ears, unless the parents are likewise Western, it’s rather insensitive to make fun of names simply because the sounds mimic those which in our culture have different meanings. If Mary Smith and John Johnson, tenth-generation Anglo-origin residents of Kansas, name their biological child Loo Phuc, then yes, that’s egregious. If however, they were Vietnamese, then Loo would be the family name (equivalent to a Western surname or last name) and Phuc is a well-established personal name meaning “blessings.” Hardly “punitive.” I’m sure there’s a language somewhere in which the sounds that make up your name mean something impolite, amusing, or rude, but that doesn’t mean you parents were irresponsible in naming you.

And as for Tiny Angel, who knows… maybe she was premature. Certainly not the name *I* would have chosen for a child, and it probably does foretell body image struggles down the road, but…

To end this tome on a lighter, less lecturous note, here are two name stories from people I’ve met.

Upon seeing the patient’s name in our appointment register, I assumed that he’d be Asian, but no, he was quite Caucasian. Eventually, after a year or two when I felt I knew him well enough to ask, I commented on his unusual name. He explained that his parents had promised to let his older sister name him. On his first day home from the hospital, she, unimpressed, announced that he whined like a tea-kettle, so she was going to name him “Tea-kettle.” She had a preschooler’s difficulty with enunciation, but his parents liked the sound of the name anyway, and thus was he christened: Teako.

Another gentleman’s mother had problems with her MIL. Seems bride and groom had married young and without permission, and moved into MIL’s house only because there was nowhere else to go – and bride was pregnant. Bride was determined to name the baby after her own grandmother, “Ernestine.” MIL was irritated – she didn’t much care for Ernestine either – and finally one day, irked that bride kept patting her stomach and talking to “Ernestine,” she asked, “What if it’s a boy? What will you name it then? Ernestine, even if it’s a boy?” Bride complacently shrugged and said, “Maybe. Maybe so.”

FFW a few months and the baby is, indeed, a boy. Perhaps bride liked the name, or perhaps it was just to spite her MIL, but she named the little boy Maby So.

Both men were in their 40s when I encountered them, so they’d have been born in the 50s, and both were quite happy with their unusual names, and enjoyed telling the stories behind them.

BTW Matthew McConaughey’s brother called his kid Miller Lyte. Putting the “ass” in “class,” that one!

IMHO, the people who give their kids weird names fall into one of three categories:

1. The terminally selfish. They know it’s a strange name, but it’s all about THEM. They put absolutely no thought into what it will be like for the kid to grow up named Number 19 Bus Shelter.
2. The terminally stupid, who name their kid something that looks pretty to them, without having ANY idea of what the word actually means. This isn’t that common, according to Snopes, but there have been reports of people naming their kids things like Chlamydia and Latrine.
3. The unfortunate, who had the best of intentions, but just didn’t think it through before naming their kid Patricia Iris Gardner (check the initials) or Amanda Lynn Strummer (sound it out).