| Rant : Suffer The Little Children Quite often, a name can tell you a bit about a person. Or, a person can tell you something about a name. Before you remark with hostile incredulity over that nonsensical-seeming last sentence, let me explain. Some people just look a certain way, in the �he looks like a Will� or �she looks like a Lisa� kind of way. Usually, commonplace names like David, Lisa or John don�t figure that much here, but rather, ostentatious abominations like Cornelius, Alphonsus, Aristotle (the gall of some people), Sylvia or Mercedes. Or Dido. I mean, seriously, if you�re gonna name your poor spawn after a stupid car or a dead philosopher who really wasn�t all that great, then you might as well call him Rectangle or Dumbo-you-suck or call her Mary-allison-lee or Pink. Oh, wait. That last one�s already been taken. And before any of you e-mail me with something banal like �You have a stupid name too, Mr. Stupid Name!� I�d take this paragraph to remind each and all of you that River Dawg is not my actual name. Sure, that�s the name printed in my bank account and all that, but my parents had real decent taste when it came to naming me. Thanks, Mum. I was thisclose to being called Justin. To this day I thank you. Wait, all this leads somewhere. I promise. Anyone remember that episode of �Friends�, back in the day when it was actually funny and the six of them were loveable? And when owning that Jennifer Aniston 1996 calendar (featuring Jennifer in 12 different short skirts) meant you wouldn�t get beat up in school by bullies (they just took your calendar) or when speaking like Matthew Perry (�could that be any dumber�) was considered the epitome of cool (could that be any dumber)? Now, you just want to hurl your pretzels, your Encyclopaedia Britannica, your armchair and your grandmother at the television whenever Monica whines about her stupid bathroom not being clean enough or when Ross tells Joey he is distressed because his boss� dog keeps humping his leg. Anyway. There was this one episode where I can remember the punchline but I cannot bloody recall the context because it was back in those days when Milli Vanilli was the hottest thing on radio. In typical River Dawg fashion, I shall just make the whole thing up, apart from the punchline itself. It went like this : Ross : Hey, you guys, you heard about my friend Bethel? She, like drowned her two dogs last night and then set her mother�s hair on fire. Phoebe : Oh, that is so cruel. Who, who in the world would name their kid �Bethel�? I honestly do not even know how to spell the awful name �Bethel�. I mean, if not for the fact that Meryl Streep is still alive, would any of you actually know how to spell that name correctly? There's probably a porn star around who named herself 'Meryl Strip' in honour of the Academy Award-winning actress. Meryl, please don't sue me for that. So imagine my horror when one day late last year (that�s 2001, for those of you still listening to Milli Vanilli), while checking one of my 23 e-mail accounts, I stumbled upon a compiled list of the ten most popular names British parents saddled onto their offspring in 2001. I shall count them down for you, with appropriate snark added. Let�s start with the guys, because the list is way more predictable and therefore, less interesting to make fun of. Although, fortunately for their kids, the minds of British parents have given up on typical names like Peter, Will, Paul and Mark, I still somehow believe that the only occasion some of these parents open their Bibles is if they need to find a good name for their sons. At #10 is Dylan, which is a pleasant surprise, really. Although I half suspect that the mothers of the poor sons called Dylan named them thus not because they wanted to pay tribute to those two great poets Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, but because back in those simple sweet-sixteen days, they used to watch �Beverly Hills 90210� and have carried their obsession with Luke Perry�s character till this day and age, only to forcibly unleash it onto their sons. Gee, that was a really long sentence. So let�s take a short paragraph break. Go to the next page to check out the rest of the list and the Top 10 for the gals. |