Nope, this isn’t a post about bad tattoos of baby names. (Though that’s a tempting post to write!) This post is about a bad tattoo that belongs to a specific person, and what that tat can teach us about baby names.
The tattoo in question belongs to starlet Hayden Panettiere. I’m not quite sure who she is, but I spotted a picture of her tattoo while looking through photos of celebrity tattoos yesterday. Here’s the caption:
Hayden Panettiere’s tattoo reads “Vivere senza rimipianti,” which means “Live without regrets” in Italian. Unfortunately, the word “rimipianti” is incorrect; it’s spelled “rimpianti.”
Yup, a tattoo typo. She took a phrase, tried to translate it into a language she obviously does not know, and wound up with a mess. A permanent mess.
And she’s not the only one with a tattoo like this. Many people waltz into tattoo parlors, see pretty characters up on the walls, and decide to get those characters written into their skin. They don’t know Chinese, or Japanese, or Khmer, or Tamil, or Hebrew, or Greek, or whatever other language the characters happen to represent. They don’t know if the characters are written properly. They don’t know if the characters mean what the tattoo artist says they mean. They just know that the characters are cool and exotic, so they go for it.
Some parents choose baby names the same way. They gravitate toward names from other cultures because these names are so different from the names they encounter every day.
Now, it’s fine to be attracted to unfamiliar things. But it’s not fine to simply take these things at face value and make them a permanent part of your life–or, worse, someone else’s life–without learning more about them first.
If Hayden had bothered to double-check her translation with an Italian dictionary or an Italian speaker, she could have caught that spelling mistake before it was etched into her skin. But she didn’t do any double-checking, her tattoo backfired in a big way, and now she looks foolish because of it.
Likewise, if a parent-to-be who is enamored of a certain exotic name bothers to do some research, she might be surprised to find out that she’s been spelling or pronouncing it incorrectly all along. She could catch her mistake before turning a bad name into her child’s name and making her child look foolish because of it.
(Or, better yet, she could come to the realization that if a name is bizarre enough to require special research, it is probably too bizarre to be passed along to a child.)
5 Comments
That reminds me of the actress Samaire Armstrong. Her parent’s pronounced her name as Sam-air, until someone told them the correct Gaelic pronunciation* when she was 3 months old.
*It’s pronounced – s?-MEER-?.
Remedios!! We almost used that as a middle name for our eldest until a friend from Cuba let us know there was a euphemism “she doesn’t have any remedy” meaning a young unmarried woman who had gotten pregnant. It’s a beautiful name, one I loved from a Garcia Marquez novel, but we live a lot closer to Cuba than south america and decided it was best to stick with names I knew better.
I cannot help but laugh at the unfortunate irony of mispelled tattoos. This is not the first time I have heard of this.
I remember some speculation that ‘Oprah’ was a mispelling of ‘Orpah’, a biblical name. Always seemed silly to me.
You make such a good point. I have an English aquaintance who named her child Kai, not realising that, as well as being the Hawaiian word for ocean, it is the Maori word for food – which wouldn’t be so bad if she was living somewhere far from New Zealand, but is a bit cringe-worthy now that she has moved there with her husband! Poor little Kai will get VERY teased at school.
This whole subject reminds me of the Mitsubishi car company who named their new vehicle Pajero without realising it means something rude in Spanish – and then wondered why it wasn’t selling very well in Spanish and Latin America!