From the 1999 movie Superstar, character Mary Katherine Gallagher talking to schoolmate Evian:
You know what, Evi? You should be really embarrassed, because your parents named you after bottled water.
From a 2016 article about Pokémon baby names:
I cross-referenced the Social Security Administration’s annual baby name records with all 151 original pocket monsters back through 1995, the year the Pokémon franchise was created. Five species of Pokémon have proven to be appealing baby names for U.S. parents: Tangela, Abra, Paras, Onix, and Eevee.
From the essay Vamsee or Taimur: Why it matters what you name your baby by Prof. Vamsee Juluri:
But what made my name somewhat of a complication for me was the fact that “Vamsee” was somehow not too familiar outside Telugu circles. My earliest encounters with high society, and I suppose, its brand of quietly privileged narcissism, were basically about people asking me if that was even a real name.
…I also liked his conclusion:
We are going to leave our children and grandchildren with a marauded and overheated planet as it is. Let us leave them with names that evoke love, creativity and dignity at least.
About Pigcasso, a 450-pound painting pig in South Africa with a genius name:
She’s fat, friendly and fabulous! Meet Pigcasso – the fine swine who was rescued from the brink of extinction at a South African pig ‘farm’. From pork chop to hog heaven, she loves the sweet things in life: Eat. Sleep. Eat. Repeat. She also loves to paint – and that’s no hogwash! Pigcasso’s primary purpose? To paint a better picture for farm animals.
Titles of Pigcasso’s paintings include Grin, Vitality, Rockstar, and Brexit.
From the Television Academy’s history of the Emmy Statuette:
After selecting the design for the statuette that would reward excellence in the television industry, Academy members were faced with decision number two: What to name the symbol.
Academy founder Syd Cassyd suggested “Ike,” the nickname for the television iconoscope tube. But with a national war hero named Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower, Academy members thought they needed a less well-known name. Harry Lubcke, a pioneer television engineer and the third Academy president, suggested “Immy,” a term commonly used for the early image orthicon camera. The name stuck and was later modified to Emmy, which members thought was more appropriate for a female symbol.
From The Age of Flexible Names by Laura Wattenberg:
[W]hile our baby-naming options are becoming ever more open, we’re closing the door on self-naming options. We’re treating our given names as, well, “givens.” They’re immutable objects, frozen in place as our parents imagined them before they ever met us. We don’t adapt them to fit different situations or life stages, or let friends bestow new names on us to reflect the experiences we accrue through our lives. We don’t reinvent our identities as my grandpa Isidore/Irving/Yitzhak did – or at least, not without a lot of soul-searching and ceremony.
Perhaps we could take some pressure off of ourselves in the naming process if we welcomed back a little of that old-time flexibility.
From an article about Hawaiian names in Maui Magazine by Kalehiaikealaikahiki “Lehia” Apana:
I’ve told the story of my name countless times: My mother was in Tahiti on a canoe-paddling trip and became very sick. Upon visiting a local doctor, she was shocked to learn that she was pregnant. Returning home, she asked H?k?lani Holt, a Hawaiian cultural practitioner and close family friend, to name her baby. The name Aunty H?k? gave me, Kalehiaikealaikahiki, translates as “the skillful fisherman on the pathway to Tahiti.”
In Hawaiian belief, one’s name is so important that many parents ask someone fluent in the language, with a deep understanding of the culture, to determine what their baby will be called. But not every child receives a Hawaiian name the way I did. For example, a name can appear through a vision or sign (inoa h?’ailona), or be given in memory of an event (inoa ho’omana’o). However it is chosen, one’s name is a prized possession, to be passed on only with the explicit permission of its owner.
From a Vanity Fair article about the Hilton family by Richard Lawson:
Anyway, all we had to do to find out that [Barron] Hilton was engaged was go on Instagram, where Hilton’s intended, Tessa Gräfin von Walderdorff, posted a picture announcing the news a few days ago. Should we talk about the fact that Barron Hilton is marrying someone named Tessa Gräfin von Walderdorff or should we just figure that that’s the kind of name you marry when you’re a son of the hotel gods?
Plus there was this line: “Barron is to be a husband, and maybe someday a father to a baby named Earrl.”
