Are you a Tree or an Alcoholic Beverage?

As remi noted, inspired by the bad baby names site, she has been collecting lists of the horrible names parents give their children for some time now, and sharing them with me for appropriate amounts of ridicule.

After all, don’t the parents deserve a little of the ridicule they are inevitably inflicting on their children? All in the cause of our amusement, of course.

However, despite our ongoing conversations about such things over a couple of years, all of it seemed a little abstract to me. Names took on the “that has to be made up” character of so much web content. Particularly as our friends have, on the whole, been naming their children actual names and spelling them traditionally.

But then remi started spending more time around schools with actual, verifiable, met face-to-face children featuring monikers like Versace. And suddenly all the outrageous, must-be-made-up, horrors seemed not only possible but probable.

And a quick trip to the birth announcements in the local paper only reinforces the point.

So, with that background, we have today’s winners in the “what the hell were they thinking?!?” stakes:

Arden
A girl. Perhaps named with the hope that an inevitable association with Elizabeth Arden would lead to beauty, or perceptions thereof? Or was it a typo and they were aiming for a more elfin name?

Ceider
Also a girl. Cider? Sayder? Cedar? Kayder? So many possibilities. So many years to explain, over and over again, how to pronounce it, how to spell it and why her parents felt it necessary to burden her with it.