What People Named Their Kids In 2012, And Happy 10th Birthday, Saddam SARS

I need to stop getting so worked up about what people name their children. But…but…I just can’t do it.

Here are a couple of particularly infuriating nuggets from BabyCenter’s top names of 2012 press release.

iBabies
The smart phone may just be the best parenting tool since diapers, and some moms and dads are paying homage to industry leader Apple in their choice of baby names. The moniker Apple, though still an unusual choice, rose 15 percent for girls, vaulting a whopping 585 spots. For boys, the name Mac jumped 12 percent. And parents sure like the sound of Siri: The company’s voice-enabled personal assistant climbed 5 percent on the list of girl names.

Space Exploration
It seems space was a huge naming inspiration for parents this year: Sky, Star, Luna, Skylar, Heaven, Stella, and Mars all flew higher than last year. BabyCenter moms aren’t alone; celebrities like Uma Thurman – who named her daughter Luna – are looking to the sky as well.

If you name your baby something like Heaven, Siri or Hashtag, somebody from the hospital should be legally obliged to punch you in the mouth…twice. Once just because you’re an idiot and/or asshole, and once on behalf of the poor kid you’re ruining.

Somehow, the top 10 lists for boys and girls weren’t as bad as I was expecting. I doubt I’d name my own kid most of these things, but a quick poke around the Names section reminds us that things could be a whole lot worse.

Girls
1.Sophia
2.Emma
3.Olivia
4.Isabella
5.Ava
6.Lily
7.Zoe
8.Chloe
9.Mia
10.Madison

Boys
1.Aiden
2.Jackson
3.Ethan
4.Liam
5.Mason
6.Noah
7.Lucas
8.Jacob
9.Jayden
10.Jack

Speaking of names, Carin pointed out to me a couple of days ago that little Saddam SARS will be turning 10 this year. To my knowledge, he’s still the worst example of what happens when mom and dad use the newspaper for inspiration.

If you’re a longtime reader and you can’t figure out how in hell this poor kid never graced these pages, there’s a simple answer. When it happened I covered it on the radio, but we were still several months away from having pages for things like this to grace. So to make things right, here he is now.

A couple in China have named their baby son Saddam SARS to mark the two important events taking place at the time of his birth, a news report said today.
The boy was born on March 20, the day the Iraq war broke out and at a time when alarm over the SARS outbreak was spreading across China.

Yup, that happened.

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