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.

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.

It’s Hungarian: Atlasz, supposedly meaning “Son of Attila”. Who knows, maybe I’m a son-of-a-byblow.

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.

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?