I tweet a fair bit. You may have noticed.
There’s a few things I tweet regularly. I am a vigorous participant in the “poowatch” hashtag, and every morning I offer a word or phrase to use in your daily conversation. These are suggested by followers, invented by me, or (more usually) nicked from the Profanisaurus.
Something else I do is watch CBeebies a lot. The nipper loves it. And three times a day, the CBeebies presenters read out gaudy cards for nippers who are celebrating a birthday. I have noticed a trend in the names of the birthday nippers: they are getting stupid. So I started the “stupidkidsnames” hashtag.
CBeebies birthday time – today’s #stupidkidsnames: Buddy, Jasmine-Imogen, Eluned. FFS.
— Andy Parmo (@andyparmo) March 3, 2013
But what constitutes a stupid kids name?
Well, there are rules. Any hyphenated first names are automatically added to the list. No arguments. They are silly. Names that are also surnames and names with ridiculous spellings of normal names are added to the list automatically too.
Other than that, it’s pretty much open to debate what constitutes a stupid kids name.
There a lots of chavvy names appearing – the same ones that people call their potatoes on The Jeremy Kyle Show, such as Jayden, Kayden and Kenzie.
There are posh names like Tarquin and Aloysius. Why would you do that to your child?
There are downright bizarre names. I blame Bob Geldof.
There is another rule. In this multicultural world in which we live, there are many strange names that we didn’t hear even ten years ago. This other rule states that if a name may be acceptable in another culture, then it doesn’t get added to the list. Recently, there was a birthday card for Nacho. “Stupid name!” I hear you cry. But it’s short for Ignacio, so it wasn’t added.
So there you go. Them’s the rules for when people call their kids totes ridic names. Like Totes Ridic.
