r/tragedeigh (11. 635)

A conflicted, guilty pleasure has been lately scrolling through the above subreddit, thinking that oh boy—there are some doozies—and while the community is good about disabusing people of names outside of the Anglophone world, there being two sides to the discussion: traditional names with non-traditional spellings and separately trending baby names, there’s yet a sour taste in one’s mouth over the general content, leafing through elementary school students’ year books and calling out names that one disapproves of. Fresh and unranked boys’ names aside—Crockett, Rake, Wilkes, Dossett, Witten, Hallow and Bazley—these decisions, sins of the proud parents get one identified instantly and it behooves one to remember that these are children we are trolling. When I worked in healthcare I recall a particular patient named Atreu, after the alter-ego of the reader of The NeverEnding Story who was portrayed rather prosaically in the movie adaptation as Bastian, whose improving charts always made me happy and one newborn adorably named Voilà—non-conventional spelling if I remember but that’s a tough one. These tragedians should not be forced to be anonymised—nor should their names be underscored with a red squiggle as a misspelling for capitalising on the vagaries of English orthography but some of these attempts to buck convention by the parents have consequences visited on the next generation.