The name game

Naming names and the perils of parenthood

“C’mere ’til I tell ya …”

Daniel Carey

IT’ isn’t easy being a kid, as Lisa Simpson once observed. It is, presumably, even more difficult if your parents call you ‘Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii’, which was the name of a nine-year-old in New Zealand until a judge recently ordered that it be changed. The young girl was so embarrassed by her name that her friends knew her only as ‘K’. “She fears being mocked and teased, and in that she has a greater level of insight than either of her parents,” Judge Rob Murfitt said of the girl.

The judge’s investigation revealed that other ‘Kiwis’ had been given names like Number 16 Bus Shelter and Midnight Chardonnay, which may relate to the circumstances of their conception. David and Victoria Beckham famously named their first child Brooklyn after the New York borough in which he was conceived, prompting the Sun headline ‘Thank God he wasn’t conceived in Peckham’, a London suburb. One New Zealander was named Violence and two pairs of twins were called Benson and Hedges and Fish and Chips. The children from another family were all named after six-cylinder Ford cars.

Of course, the habit of giving kids unusual names is not confined to the Southern Hemisphere. Few in this country go quite so far as the Manguzis in Norfolk, England who named their son Alex Ferguson Barthez Silvestre Neville Johnsen Irwin Stam Brown May Beckham Keane Scholes Butt Veron Giggs Chadwick Cole Yorke Nistelrooy Solskjaer Glover Manguzi, a brother for Trafford Matt Busby. In case you hadn’t guessed, they’re Manchester United fans. With parents like that, who needs enemies?

Of course, sport can lead people to behave in all kinds of strange ways vis-à-vis their offspring. Most people in Beijing may be looking forward to the Olympic Games, but one woman in the Chinese capital is presumably quite wary of sporting events given her experience of the 2006 football World Cup. Her house went on fire during the game between France and Spain, and when she heard the neighbours shouting, she took her little baby and ran out in her nightclothes. Her husband, by contrast, paid no attention to the danger, just grabbed the television and put it under his arm. After getting out of the house, he then set about finding an electric socket to plug in so that he could continue watching the game.

But there’s such a thing as being over-protective too. One extreme example of this happened in Germany in 2006, when 92-year-old Adelheid Schmidt summoned social services to speak to her daughter about her ‘uncontrollable, immoral and loose behaviour with men’. It was only when they paid her a visit that social workers realised ‘young’ Tina Schmidt was a mere 68 years of age. Mrs Schmidt made the call after discovering that Tina had a boyfriend, but the social workers told her they could not help as her ‘child’ was 50 years past the age limit where social services can get involved. Sometimes, parents just have to let go.