what's in a name?

There used to be a joke in my house about kids who died of name poisoning. You'd see the obituary listing for little baby Scrambled Eggs Hashbrown Juanita Jones in the newspaper and you'd say, "Another one died of name poisoning." Are we all going to hell? Most definitely. But Memphis is the No. 1 city for infant mortality and we do have an abundance of exquisitely bad baby names, so the two were bound to intersect at some point. And hey, if you can't laugh about these things they'd just bring you down, and who wants to spend all their time being sad about the poor babies? When you can laugh at their ridiculous names?

I haven't convinced you that it's okay to laugh at dead babies yet, have I? I probably never will. Moving on.

I often hear that horrible names should be written off as being no fault of the child who bears them, because the child didn't choose that name and therefore it has nothing to do with their intellect or character. We can't really judge Scrambled Eggs by her name, these people would tell you, because Scrambled Eggs's crazy-ass mama is the one who named her that and little did SHE know that Scrambled Eggs would end up getting her G.E.D. and going on to Sally Struthers-endorsed paralegal school.

But here's the problem with that logic. Let's use the most recent example of bat-shit-crazy, Balloon Boy, whose name happens to be Falcon.

I think if you name your kid "Falcon" you're pretty much asking for a child that behaves like three-quarters of his blood is actually low-grade methamphetamines. Mostly I think this because if you're going to name your kid Falcon, you must have already achieved a certain level of crazy prior to procreating and have undoubtedly passed those chromosomes on to your offspring.

So it's not that I'm judging Scrambled Eggs based on her name alone. I'm judging her based on my estimations of how many of her mama's genetic malfunctions were passed directly on to her. I mean, if your Punnett Square is three-fourths capital C for CUH-RAZY to begin with, there really ain't a combo up in the joint that doesn't result in full to partial effed-on-up. That's a technical term.

And I'm not saying there aren't genetic anomalies. Because there are. I think the Zappa kids mostly turned out okay, or at least they haven't committed any federal offenses that I know of. But I guess we won't really have the answer to this question until this generation of celebrity babies, Apple and Moses and CocoButter and Rubbermaid Toaster Oven, grows up.

Of course by then it might've caught on and every woman who's any woman will want to name her baby after an inanimate object. Let's just hope the kid turns out smarter than one.


cheers,
elizabeth