The Dumbest Thing I Have Ever Read
Brace yourselves everybody. This is completely retarded :
- Anitria Akins of Atlanta had always wanted a Lexus, and now she’ll always have one. She named her 9-year-old daughter A’lexus after the popular car.
“There were so many ‘Alexises’ out there, and I wanted something different,” says Akins, a U.S. Postal Service supervisor. “I thought about naming her just ‘Lexus,’ but I wanted something that started with an A.”
Plenty of other people have been having the same idea. In 2000, there were 1,263 girls named Alexus whose parents registered them for Social Security numbers. There were also 553 girls named Lexus, Lexxus, Lexis or Lexxis.
They’re part of a growing trend toward naming children after products — brand-name babies.
There are kids named after cars: Corvette, Acura, Camry, Celica, Infiniti. Little designers: Armani, Dior and Halston. Alcohol brand names abound: Courvoisier and Hennessy could be coming soon to a preschool near you, joining Killian and Guinness and Ronrico.
. . .
Children now about 3 years old are named Delta, Avis, Disney, Ikea, Evian, Hyatt, Breck and Delmonte.There’s a little boy in Texas named ESPN. Connie Brown of Atlanta has a granddaughter in Washington, D.C., named Cambria, after a brand of wine. It’s also a type of kitchen countertop, she notes.
I guess this is all part of the “bling-bling”-ization of our culture. I really don’t have much more to add other than to say I don’t think I’d be able to have a meaningful conversation with anyone who is so goddamn stupid that they would name their kid after a brand of whiskey.
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In the long run, is it much worse than naming someone after their vocation or location?
Comment by Earnest — December 30, 2003 @ 12:22 pm
I think it just speaks to how commercalized things have gotten in this country. Now people indentify themselves in terms of what brands they consume, not in terms of family identity. It’s more common to have a group get together because they watch the same TV show than because someone is ‘Joe Bob’s daughter’…
Comment by Shannon — December 30, 2003 @ 1:32 pm
I wish my parents had named me Guinness. At least it would have made my college years more funny. Actually, now that I think about it, my roommate was named “Bong,” and we got a lot of mileage out of that.
Comment by dAnimal — December 30, 2003 @ 1:42 pm
Well no E, they’re very similar in fact. It’s a good point, though I think you might be oversimplifying things a bit. The similarity between branding children, and between being named after your job or home town, isn’t neccesarily a good thing.
Only the poor were named after their professions or home town – the reason for this is that the poor and unpowerful weren’t afforded any rcognition of their individuality, as they had no real hope of escaping their position in life. This was similar in many ways to the Caste system in India, the Roman Labor pool, greek metic class, or to Fuedalism in Japan, where poor people didn’t even have names – their name was their job was their name.
As you know, the wealthy and powerful (Nobility and Royalty) have always had family names denoting their status and individuality (This is true for pretty much all of human history). It was only with the rise of representative government, individualism, market economic activity and the rise of the middle class that all people’s names became important indcators of their identity, and thus the naming people with their location or job declined.
And you must admit, you’ll not find very many Smiths as members of Royal families (Of course, Morrissey hating the royal family might be a reason for this… da dum dum). And I highly Doubt we’ll ever have a president Nike, or a Senator Sony. The rich will never, I repeat, never voluntarily give up their own individual identities, even if they do pretend to encourage poor people to do so as an expression of some neo-fuedalist psuedo capitalist BS.
This new trend is a bad thing, not only because it encourages people to identify themselves more with products and corporations than with their society, but because it gives a cultural legitimacy to entities who have no loyalty or direct connection to the society.
Basically, in my opinion, what were seeing is the development of a form of neo-fuedalism, something we should all be scared of.
That isn’t to say we should refrain from naming people after pretty things. A corvette hasn’t always been a brand name – It’s a type of ship, a rather elegant, if silly, thing to name someone after, in my humble opinion.
Comment by The Eligible Ross Lincoln — December 30, 2003 @ 1:51 pm
Yeah, the rich have never given their kids bizarre names or anything.
I think this article is just another sign of how media saturation has actually become co-opted by the very people it was trying to co-opt.
Comment by Kyle — December 30, 2003 @ 2:46 pm
On a similar note, check out American Brandstand, which tracks the number of “shout outs” in popular music.
Comment by greg — December 30, 2003 @ 3:42 pm
Kyle, I never said anything like “the rich have never given their kids weird names” – I was saying that the rich will never sublimate their identities and status to a job or product, at least in their names. Or at least it can be argued that, historically, they never have. I realize this is something I can’t prove 100% (Particularly in a blog comments post), but the history is, for the most part, fairly sound.
Anyway, the point isn’t that the names are bizarre (There are of course tons of bizarre names), it’s that people are choosing corporate identities for their personal identities. And that this is, in my opinion, a troubling development.
I’m not sure what you mean by “…just another sign of how media saturation has actually become co-opted by the very people it was trying to co-opt.” Can you clarify a bit?
Comment by The Eligible Ross Lincoln — December 30, 2003 @ 3:59 pm
Obviously, if there are examples of rich and powerful people doing this, I will love to see them, (Paris Hilton doesn’t count, though it’s close – It has to have been a lucid decision by her parents, don’cha think?) so someone out there, bring it!
Comment by The Eligible Ross Lincoln — December 30, 2003 @ 4:02 pm
Thanks for mentioning her…the first time that I heard her name I speculated that it was where she was conceived.
For the record, Atlas is my patronym, and either refers to a) somebody’s service in Attila’s army (family legend), or b) a silk merchant in our past. Either way, name=occupation.
Comment by Atlas — December 30, 2003 @ 4:12 pm
That’s the coolest last name I’ve heard in ages. I think you should tell people it’s from Atilla. Much scarier.
Comment by The Eligible Ross Lincoln — December 30, 2003 @ 4:16 pm
Thanks! 3 guesses which explanation I usually give out.
It’s Hungarian: Atlasz, supposedly meaning “Son of Attila”. Who knows, maybe I’m a son-of-a-byblow.
Comment by Atlas — December 30, 2003 @ 4:20 pm
“I was saying that the rich will never sublimate their identities and status to a job or product, at least in their names.”
Well, oftentimes their names already are tied to the product (Hilton, Hilfiger, et al). And I knew a rich girl that her parents named Mercedes.
I think it’s such a massive generalization you’re making about rich people and what they will or will not do, en masse…and for me to be defending the rich, you reeeally gotta be overstepping some line. Also, this isn’t 17th century England… the rich is not a fixed body that other classes can’t break into. Even accepting your theory that only the poor would name their children after brands, it’s totally conceivable that one of those poor kids could then go on to become rich.
Especially now that we live in the age of the rap businessman, where some of the richest men in New York society have names like “Diddy” and “Jay-Z,” I would argue that a correlation between a name and wealth isn’t what it used to be. And those men, clearly, are no strangers to branding.
The only truly bad thing in that article is that the mother is excited to name her daughter a derivative of the word “Lexus” because it will make her unique. But she’s deriving that uniqueness from a mass-produced brand name, so how special is it, really? At least she gussied it up a little.
Comment by Kyle — December 31, 2003 @ 2:07 am
Good points of course. I was making an generalization, though mostly to make a point about the past. I’m not sure I was being that outlandish, but I certainly should have made more pains to make a distinction between the nobility of the past and the wealthy of today, particularly as we are still, fortunately, in the era of somewhat upward mobility.
And you’re right, the set class structure that existed in the 1600s doesn’t exist now. Things have significantly changed. What I do think, however awkwardly phrased, is that this trend represents a troubling step backward, which is probably what I should have said more clearly from the beginning.
It’s fair to say my statements about the past significance of names is fair, though I would of course mention that Hilton, Hilfiger, Ford, etc have their names tied to products because they have products named after them, not the other way around. And Mercedes is a real name, and was long before automobiles even existed. The car was named after the car designer’s wife.
Regarding rap businesspersons, I will conceded that branding isn’t a new thing there – It might be noted that they’re branding themselves (Since none of them, for the most part go around calling themselves MC Ford, though the Gucci Crew might disagree with me), however, the current hip hop obsession with corporate identity makes your point for you.
Related to this, I wonder if will we reach a point where someone, whose professional name is P diddy, will be able to run for office under the name P Diddy, rather than under the name Sean Combs. It would be interesting to see.
Your closing about A’Lexus is the most important thing. That is super dumb, though as you point out, at least she gussied it up. Besides, everyone knows that Accenture McRib is the new hip name.
Comment by The Eligible Ross Lincoln — December 31, 2003 @ 10:01 am
My wife Propecia and I named our children Viagra, Vagisil and Splenda after old relatives. The fact that their names coincide with products is pure accident. At least that’s what my grandpa John Deere told me.
Comment by Darth Flatulent — January 2, 2004 @ 6:23 am
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Comment by ahams — January 30, 2004 @ 3:26 pm