Celebrities are famous for giving their children utterly ridiculous names. But what about the normal Joes who are saddled with monikers that aren’t anything like ‘Joe’? At least the children of famous people can cry about their names while sitting on top of their huge piles of cash and maybe beating their slaves. If you’re just an ordinary guy with parents who were suffering temporary insanity when they named you, you’re in for a much tougher time.

Weird Worm Podcast - Ep68 - Cruel and Unusual Types of Baby Names [ 7:04 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Here are some types of cruel and unusual names that non-celebrities are naming their hapless children:

So you like something. You really, really like it. You could consider yourself a fanatic. Is it enough to have posters on your wall, or to spend all your money on merchandise? No. For some people, the only way to truly prove that you’re a true fan of something is to name a kid after it.

In its most harmless form, you see parents naming children after celebrities or fictional characters that have relatively normal names. So, for example, the name ‘Harry’ rose in popularity when the Harry Potter books became popular. But what if you’re a fan of a person with a more unusual name? Or what if you want your kid to be a constant, unmistakable reminder of how much you love your celebrity crush? For example, the name ‘Ben’ is too normal. Why not name him or her Affleck? Then you can be reminded every day of that great movie, Pearl Harbor.

Cinematic abortion didn’t fit on the birth certificate.

But we’re still in the tame ones. One mother, apparently a horror movie fan, named her kid Vorhees. Yes, after Jason Vorhees, this guy:

The woman who performed this cruel deed was apparently a fan of more than one franchise, though, because poor little Vorhees has siblings called Morpheus, Frodo and Rogue. And branching out from popular culture, another sibling is called Peppermint. Hey, you can be a fan of peppermint, can’t you?

There’s a problem with trying to be unique: everyone’s doing it. In the past couple of decades, many parents have been rebelling against ‘traditional’ names with long histories. So they chose names like ‘Kayleigh’ and ‘Brayden’ that had been obscure up until then, and sometimes almost non-existent. What better way to prove your child’s uniqueness, right?

There was one problem: trendy baby names spread like a virus. Little Madison might have been the only one in her class named that in 1985, but in 2008 Madison was the fourth most popular girls’ name in America. Your unique and precious snowflake is now awash in a sea of Madisons. It would have been more original just to name her Sarah.

The Typhoid Mary of the Madison Virus

Which brings us to another potential problem for these kids is that anyone upon hearing their name is going to immediately recognize two things: one, the year in which they were born, and two, that their mother was most likely a sheep-like follower of fashion. A man named ‘Daniel’ could have been born in 2008 or AD 108. When you hear the name ‘Jayden’, though, you know the kid was probably born after 2001, when the name suddenly shot to stardom.

What if you just can’t stomach the idea of your darling little angel not having a unique name, but you’re also too unoriginal to come up with something different? Simply misspell the name!

Here are some real baby names: Jennipher, Jessyka, Destyneigh (because nothing is better for a growing young woman than having the sound a horse makes in her name!), Taelor, Mychal, and Loegan. But there’s many more – any name in the English language can be misspelled for that genuine ‘my mother was seventeen years old and on drugs when she gave me it’ feeling.

Stay classy, British media.

This type of cruel and unusual naming introduces a new type of torture to your innocent child. Sure, the kid named ‘Vorhees’ will be getting turned down on job applications and accosted by his girlfriends’ fathers his whole life, but at least the average person will know how to spell it. Poor Jasyn, on the other hand, faces a long perdition of spelling out his name, again and again, forever. “No, Jasyn with a ‘y’. Yes, I know it’s meant to be an ‘o’. Yeah, my mother was a drunk. My middle name? Okay, it’s a long one…”