hermhater
04-07-2008, 01:22 PM
Iona Knipl...
:biggrin:
And The Worst Bad Name Is . . .
By John Tierney (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jtierney/)
Tags: names (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/names), psychology (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/psychology)
We have a winner in the Worst Bad Name Contest (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/i-the-worst-bad-name-contest/). And after talking to the woman who has this name, I’m happy to report we have new anecdotal evidence to go with the psychological studies supporting the Boy Named Sue theory (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/science/11tier.html): good things can indeed come from a bad name.
It wasn’t easy picking a winner from more than 1,000 entries. Besides Charman Toilette, an early favorite of the judges, there was Chastity Beltz, Wrigley Fields, Justin Credible, Tiny Bimbo, and a girl whose father was an auto mechanic but somehow didn’t realize he was effectively giving her the name of a tire: Michele Lynn. There were girls named Chaos and Tutu, and boys named Clever, Cowboy, Crash, Felony, Furious and Zero. There was Unnamed Jones (pronounced you-NAH-med). There was Brook Traut and his daughter, Rainbow. There were more names involving genitalia than the judges cared to count. (Memo to parents: Carefully consider your surname before naming a boy Harry or Richard.)
The grand prize, a copy of “Bad Baby Names,” (http://www.badbabynames.net/) by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback, goes to Kate (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/i-the-worst-bad-name-contest/#comment-112519), a Lab reader who nominated a fellow resident of the Cleveland area: Iona Knipl. The judges chose it because, in addition to being an embarrassing pun, it also set up an inevitable reply from people imagining they were being wittily original. I called up Miss Knipl and asked her how many times she had heard someone meet her and reply, “I own two.”
“I got sick of hearing it, but what can you do?” Miss Knipl said. “My mother never thought about that when she was naming me. It was her mother’s name. I came home from school a couple times crying and my mother said, ‘Oh, why did I do that?’ but it had never occurred to her how people would hear the name.”
Miss Knipl shed the pun when she got married and began using her husband’s last name. But then, after they were divorced, she went right back to her old name. It might have simpler to keep her husband’s name, she told me, but by this time she had come to appreciate the advantages of Iona Knipl.
“In school it bothered me, but now I think it’s neat,” she said. “It’s different.”
I’m glad to hear that her story, like Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue,” has a happy ending — in fact, I wonder now if I should have called it the Best Bad Name Contest. Iona Knipl’s experience jibes with the psychological research I cited in my Findings column (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/science/11tier.html?pagewanted=2), and with the opinion of experts like Cleveland Evans, a psychologist at Bellevue University in Nebraska and a past president of the American Names Society. Dr. Evans says that while he’d advise against certain names — he once pleaded with a woman not to name her daughter Tyranny — there’s plenty of anecdotal and scientific evidence that children turn out fine.
“Both Ima Hogg and Shanda Lear seem to have done very well with their names,” he told me, referring to the daughters of a Texas governor and the founder of Lear Jet. “I think the biggest factor in whether such a name negatively impacts a child would be the overall nature of their relationship with their parents. If the child has a warm and loving relationship with the name-giver, the name will probably be shrugged off as a minor nuisance and a conversation piece.”
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/and-the-worst-bad-name-is/index.html?ex=1365307200&en=c5f085fcf1a46c90&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
:biggrin:
And The Worst Bad Name Is . . .
By John Tierney (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/author/jtierney/)
Tags: names (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/names), psychology (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/psychology)
We have a winner in the Worst Bad Name Contest (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/i-the-worst-bad-name-contest/). And after talking to the woman who has this name, I’m happy to report we have new anecdotal evidence to go with the psychological studies supporting the Boy Named Sue theory (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/science/11tier.html): good things can indeed come from a bad name.
It wasn’t easy picking a winner from more than 1,000 entries. Besides Charman Toilette, an early favorite of the judges, there was Chastity Beltz, Wrigley Fields, Justin Credible, Tiny Bimbo, and a girl whose father was an auto mechanic but somehow didn’t realize he was effectively giving her the name of a tire: Michele Lynn. There were girls named Chaos and Tutu, and boys named Clever, Cowboy, Crash, Felony, Furious and Zero. There was Unnamed Jones (pronounced you-NAH-med). There was Brook Traut and his daughter, Rainbow. There were more names involving genitalia than the judges cared to count. (Memo to parents: Carefully consider your surname before naming a boy Harry or Richard.)
The grand prize, a copy of “Bad Baby Names,” (http://www.badbabynames.net/) by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback, goes to Kate (http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/i-the-worst-bad-name-contest/#comment-112519), a Lab reader who nominated a fellow resident of the Cleveland area: Iona Knipl. The judges chose it because, in addition to being an embarrassing pun, it also set up an inevitable reply from people imagining they were being wittily original. I called up Miss Knipl and asked her how many times she had heard someone meet her and reply, “I own two.”
“I got sick of hearing it, but what can you do?” Miss Knipl said. “My mother never thought about that when she was naming me. It was her mother’s name. I came home from school a couple times crying and my mother said, ‘Oh, why did I do that?’ but it had never occurred to her how people would hear the name.”
Miss Knipl shed the pun when she got married and began using her husband’s last name. But then, after they were divorced, she went right back to her old name. It might have simpler to keep her husband’s name, she told me, but by this time she had come to appreciate the advantages of Iona Knipl.
“In school it bothered me, but now I think it’s neat,” she said. “It’s different.”
I’m glad to hear that her story, like Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue,” has a happy ending — in fact, I wonder now if I should have called it the Best Bad Name Contest. Iona Knipl’s experience jibes with the psychological research I cited in my Findings column (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/science/11tier.html?pagewanted=2), and with the opinion of experts like Cleveland Evans, a psychologist at Bellevue University in Nebraska and a past president of the American Names Society. Dr. Evans says that while he’d advise against certain names — he once pleaded with a woman not to name her daughter Tyranny — there’s plenty of anecdotal and scientific evidence that children turn out fine.
“Both Ima Hogg and Shanda Lear seem to have done very well with their names,” he told me, referring to the daughters of a Texas governor and the founder of Lear Jet. “I think the biggest factor in whether such a name negatively impacts a child would be the overall nature of their relationship with their parents. If the child has a warm and loving relationship with the name-giver, the name will probably be shrugged off as a minor nuisance and a conversation piece.”
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/and-the-worst-bad-name-is/index.html?ex=1365307200&en=c5f085fcf1a46c90&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss