BabyCenter has come out with its list of unusual baby names recorded in 2012. Someone actually named their newborn son “Haven’T”. Someone else actually named their newborn son “Navaryous.” 
To be fair, the persons who named their boys “Neon” and “Turbo” might be Orthodox or Catholic. There is a St. Neon, and there is a St. Turbo, both of whom died as martyrs in the 3rd century persecutions of Valerian. However, a Turbo Neon would be one bitchin’ Dodge subcompact, amirite?
Mr. Pickwick says: Okay, here’s my all-time favorite baby name debacle. When my wife worked in a hospital, she was present when a nurse handed a newborn child to his mother. “I had to wipe some meconium off him,” said the nurse. “That’s what you call a baby’s first bowel movement; it’s mostly bile, mucous and cells.” When the birth certificate was filed, guess what the mama had named her son? “Meconium Jones.” Sounded kinda Roman, I guess….
Joshua says: I don’t know if this show is on your cultural radar at all, but “Key & Peele” did a skit on the increasing ridiculousness of the names of (college) football players, found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gODZzSOelss
If the link doesn’t work, YouTube “Key & Peele” and “East-West.”
Nothing really deep here, but the skit never fails to make me laugh, and your link reminded me of it.
Noah172 says: A Jump Start On Hating Their Parents
“Hating Their Parents” is #17 on the Stuff White People Like list. A great fraction, perhaps a majority, of these ridiculous and amusing names are given by black mothers. SWPL mothers rarely embarass themselves or their offspring quite in this manner; rather, they go for “Hunter”, “Monroe”, “Dakota”, and so forth.
My mother-in-law, who is a kindergarten assistant, recently had a girl named “Nevaeh” (that’s “heaven” backwards). My wife, who taught five years in public high school, had a “M’Queet” (who, scarily enough, had the same surname as her maiden name) and a “Starace” (pronounced stair’-us) and God only knows how many other weird names which we can recall no longer, as well as a college classmate named “Khavaja”.
Someone actually named their newborn son “Haven’T”.
Talk about structual inequality and reduced upward mobility! This kid was born to be “have not”! A sign of the times.
Zach says: Not any worse than the parents who named their kid “Hashtag”.
Sands says: Last year Dallas Cowboys was on the list. It’s bad enough to raise your kid to be a fan of the Cowboys (bordering on child abuse, really). But naming him after the team? Poor kid.
Beth says: I like the names with all the apostrophes inserted for no apparent reason. However the apostrophes are more commonly referred to as “comma at the top”, when spelling
the child’s name.
Jeffersonian says: Just off the top of my head, all real, ttbomr:
Kartaeveous
Denim Blue
Ty’heaven
Shirley, for a male.
Tayveon
Kali, Callie, Kalle, Calley, Kalleigh, ad nauseam…
DeCrayon, but pronounced “De-CRAY-vee-on.
Essie, for a boy.
Ty’audreonnah
Tawdry [seriously]
Aquanet, after the hairspray– they call her ‘Nettie
Joey, for a girl
Jumeriah, J’America
Ty’liecianna
The best, I think are the Brazilians I’ve known–Rodrigo, Carolina, Prisilla— who all have to think extremely hard to recall their entire name in one sitting. Everyone is on a first name basis.
FL Transplant says: When my late father-in-law was born in the 1920’s his parents wanted to name him Jeremiah–a fine Biblical name. Unfortunately, the country clerk who recorded the birth heard Jerry Marah, so he ended up with a not unusual first name and a unique middle one.
KateLE says: I can’t believe no-one else is going here yet, so I’m taking one for the team… ridiculous names (for which your child will sympathetically be mad at you) are ok as long as they are religous?
Helen says: I agree with Sands — raising a child to be a Cowboys fan is terrible and may warrant intervention.
Well, all those names on the Baby Center site are weird. Are they weirder than the Palin kids’ names (children Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig, grandson Tripp)? Not to me — the Palin names are very, very weird to me. But I grew up Irish-Catholic in New Jersey, where pretty much everyone had a traditional name (I am 41, so I grew up before Brittany and Madision and similar names became popular).
Then again, my youngest child is named after a flower (and she’s not named Lily or Rose), so my husband and I are guilty of using an unusual name for one of our three kids. (The other two’s names are not common but they are very traditional.)
Helen says: Also, Rod, in general the adjective “bitchin’ ” should only be used to describe the noun “Camero.” You did not grow up in New Jersey so you didn’t know, so it’s easier for me to be forgiving. But now you know, so don’t make that mistake again, okay? 
Noah172 says: Well, all those names on the Baby Center site are weird. Are they weirder than the Palin kids’ names (children Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig, grandson Tripp)? Not to me — the Palin names are very, very weird to me.
I remember reading on Slate after McCain selected Palin a writer who had lived in Alaska saying (if memory serves), “You think ‘Trig’ is weird? I knew a family who named their kid ’9′ — not “N-i-n-e”, 9.”
RB says: I am a baby name hobbyist; I entered the naming world by necessity (we’re expecting baby #8 in a couple months) but stayed for pleasure.
I think baby names are terrific because any parent can choose any name they like–no money, certification or group membership required. At least not officially.
But then that’s also the problem with baby names–parents can choose any name they like, including ones many people look down on.
This is one of those few areas where I think relatavism applies–there is no absolute “right name” for a given baby or culture; not only because of diversity of parents, but also because of shifting naming fashions.
One of our friends in the military was criticized by her family for giving her son, Justin, a “white name”. I have run some people who dislike my children’s Japanese names, because they seem strange, or because they feel I don’t look Japanese enough to be excused for using them.
The majority opinion at most baby name sites is very SWPL-oriented, with a vanguard of hipsters swiping names from the London elite, shading into yupster/bobo namers. This is where you find more of the naming absolutists, who tend to pity the less enlightened naming proles, even though their name-fashionista status depends on a naming underclass that serves a a basis for comparison.
Then there’s the minority naming group that tends to go for Neveah/Brayden/Jaxon names, less numerous in naming circles than in real life. The naming elite tend to look down on them for not applying themselves to finding The Right Name, and they don’t, beyond using a kree8tif spelling; likely this is because, unlike the rest of us obsessive babynamers, they actually have real lives.
What I think is interesting about the Anglo-Saxon naming world is how often we use names where we don’t know the meaning, to the point we think that’s normal, and laugh about names like Apple or Sparrow or Mercy as being too hippie, too Puritan, too strange. But naming children with words is pretty common in other cultures; English is unique in its lexical heterogeneity, so we accept names that mean something in French or Chinese, or in older forms of English that linger on in surnames, but actual words for names? Too strange.
So my theory has been that, as American babynaming has unmoored from concrete, readily understandable meaning, the door opens to increasingly abstract names or names of concrete things that seem initially inappropriate but really are perfectly in keeping with our culture. And there you get names like Lexus, Hashtag and Dallas Cowboys.
I think our culture is affecting other cultures, too, not just in the rise of English cognates in other languages, but also in the elevating of the novel over the traditional in naming practices.
Of course it’s not always as simple that; there are many other factors at play in each culture, or the same factors playing in a different way. Japan is a good example: for all they appear to be hidebound traditionalists, they eagerly jettison old naming practices in favor of new ones, and the language has changed as much in the past 100 years there as English has changed in the past 400. My grandmother’s samurai grandfather’s name doesn’t have a conversationally recognizable name anymore; that has to be gleaned from the kanji it’s written in. Luckily we can use his Christian name gained by his conversion to the Russian Orthodox church; otherwise the family genealogists would be sunk.
Surly says: I’m hopelessly bougie, because everybody I know applies the “Supreme Court Test” to their baby names, so we get lots ‘o’ Henrys and Violets and other old man/old lady names. For us the most crazy deviation is the young parents that named their daughter Schuyler but spelled it Skylar.
My pet peeve is my snooty cousin who named his kids “Jack” and “Kate” and not “John” and “Katherine.” Philistine.
Peter H says: Finesse Mitchell, on Weekend Update, discussing a Danish law pertaining to children’s names.
I seem to remember a Rita Mae Brown on “Fresh Air” saying that for Southerners, naming babies is something of a contact sport.
Rambler88 says: Apropos of Saints Turbo and Neon… There’s actually a little town somewhere in European Russia called Kodak. I’ve always wondered if the Patriarch Nikon ever visited there.
elvisd says: Someone hasn’t yet posted that really, yes, for real, there are a couple of twins in his town named Orangjello and Lemonjello, a girl named Female (Fe-mah-lay), and a boy named Sheetheed.
Hunsdon says: Camaro, Helen—it’s CAMARO!
While it is amusing to mock nonconforming names, we are fishing in shallow waters here. Some of my favorite “goofy” names come from very serious people indeed, including the more severe Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries.
I think my personal favorite is If-Christ-had- not-died-for- thee-thou-hadst- been-damned. He changed his name to “Nicholas.”
When I was trying to write a Scottish bildungsroman, the lead character was For-by-Grace-are-ye-saved-through-Faith Campbell, known as Grace Campbell. Ah well.
Cliff says: Look at the other end of the list: the most popular name for a boy child these days is “Aiden”. Aiden! What kind of a name is Aiden? I’ve never much liked my own name but I’d rather be an Aethelred than an Aiden.
Old Whig says: My wife, a mother/baby care nurse, occasionally will tell me about the naming wierdnesses she deals with daily. The one that sticks in my mind is the poor girl whose name was pronounced shi-THAYD but spelled sh*thead.
O.W.
JLF says: Come on, Rod. As a good history student you should remember the name of the Speaker of the House of Commons during the Puritan Commonwealth, Praise God Barebones.
I’m with RB, I think a lot of this is cultural assumption and some is cultural prejudice. I’m a middle class Jew whose biological children all have Biblical names (all mildly unusual at the time of their naming, but clearly very much in the cultural moment, since two of them are quite popular) – I don’t necessarily think my underlying cultural presumptions are that much better than someone who names their daughter “Precious” “Princess” or “NaQueena” (and yes, all those children have come into my home) to express their adoration of their daughter. I wouldn’t personally add a weird spelling and apostrophe to my child’s name, but I don’t honestly find it objectionable that someone does, any more than that we chose an ethnic variant of one family name that we thought was too popular. I actually find the preference for Qs and Zs to be kind of cute. I rather liked the twin boys named “Colossus” and “Goliath” actually, too.
But then again, my father in law was named after a variety of Burgundy wine by his new-English speaking mother who wanted a name that sounded British (it doesn’t). A good friend from college was named “Tacky” by his Chinese mother who thought that the name sounded both Chinese and American. A hippie relation of my husband’s named her daughter “Little Lulu” on the birth certificate in 1974 until she and her spouse stopped fighting over the name (quite some time later) and named the girl “Deva” which of course, is masculine in Hindi. My father has long sworn that he would have named my sisters and I Regan, Goneril and Cordelia, had he known he would have three daughters, something that I’ve gloried in my whole life since my middle sister would have had to get along with “Goneril” even as bad as “Regan” would have been in the 80s.
I have friends who named their children “Byron” “Hadrian” “Locke” “Mehitabelle” and a son who complains regularly that I didn’t name him “Habakkuk” (my answer for why not was that I didn’t want him to e Habakkuk W. in his class, with all the other little Habakkuks ). So I guess I find names fascinating, but I don’t find them offensive, much.
Sharon
Uncle Vanya says: The very worst baby name I ever heard was “Thanatos” for a little boy, one which will make him suitably fit to become a mortician.
Helen says: Ack, Hunsdon, you are right. I was typing too fast! These comboxes need spellcheck, Rod.
Sam M says: “DeCrayon, but pronounced “De-CRAY-vee-on.”
I always wondered how far you could take this. Can I spell my kid’s name “Steve” and pronounce it “Mitch”?
Also, I have noticed that tons of people are using last names for first names. Jackson, Taylor, Connor etc. For some reason, people seem to have arrived at some sort of spontaneous order on this issuse. You don’t see a lot of kids named Wilson or MacDougal.
Then the trade names. Things like Cooper. Makes you wonder if, in the future, lots of peopel will name their kids “Administrative Assistant” or “Certified Nurse Practitioner.” Those seem unlikely, but I can see something like “Coder” catching on.
David J. White says: A great fraction, perhaps a majority, of these ridiculous and amusing names are given by black mothers.
I remember reading a column by the late African-American columnist William Raspberry about just this issue. His main objecdtion to names of this sort is that, as he put it, these kids aren’t named for anyone. When he was growing up, he said, it was common to name children after a parent, or grandparent, or aunt or uncle or other relative, which, he felt, gave a child a feeling of being connected to and part of the family.
For example, I was named after my two grandfathers: my mother’s father was David, my father’s father was James.
One thing I’ve noticed in teaching over the past couple of decades is that while it was once possible to look over a class roster before the start of the semester and guess, with a fair degree of accuracy, the race of a particular student based on that student’s name (Caitlyn was probably white, LaShondra was probably black), that is no longer the case, since many names that were once considered more “typical” of a particular race or ethnicity seem to have become less so, at least with female names. In class I have had black girls named Megan and white girls named Keisha.
Back in the 1950s, my father taught a student named “Daisy Belle rise up and tell the glory of Emmanuel.” That makes the names of my current students look stodgy and conservative by comparison.
Father wanted to name me Versine (the old name for ethylene diamine tetracetic acid) on the grounds that it takes precious metals out of solution, and I would do the same to his bank account. My mother refused. Presumably she had heard quite enough chemistry jokes when they were engaged, and his peers used to ask him if he’d made ‘Ethel palpitate.’
Noah172 says: One thing I’ve noticed in teaching over the past couple of decades is that while it was once possible to look over a class roster before the start of the semester and guess, with a fair degree of accuracy, the race of a particular student based on that student’s name (Caitlyn was probably white, LaShondra was probably black), that is no longer the case
That may be true of certain names, or when focusing on the last, say, thirty years. I am not so sure that this observation holds up in a broader historical perspective.
Think of the names of African-American historical figures born before the 1960s: Crispus (from the Latin for “curly”) Attucks, Benjamin Banneker, Denmark Vesey, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker Washington, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (gosh, you half expect a Roman numeral after that one), George Washington Carver, Oscar DePriest, Marcus Garvey, Asa Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Malcolm Little, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Edward Brooke, Thurgood Marshall, John Allen Hendrix, William Henry Cosby, Marvin Gaye. Think even of some of the major early figures in rap, born in the 60s and early 70s: Christopher George Latore Wallace (Notorious BIG), Andre Romelle Young (Dr. Dre), Eric Lynn Wright (Easy E).
Sure, some of these names are unusual, yet none of them are bizarre neologisms like “Navaryous,” or faux-African Black Power political statements.
(Side-note: Isn’t it interesting how in the Bad Old Days black parents used to name their children after the great white men of history, such as Martin Luther and George Washington? One might think that these parents had respect for whites as a whole, even while having understandable enmity for some who mistreated blacks. In our more racially enlightened age, we might patronize these black parents of yesteryear for their “false consciousness”.)
Catechist says: It didn’t take long for the perennial Naming Urban Myths of Meconium, Oranjello & Lemonjello, and Sh*thead to make their appearance. If those names were really given as often as people swear, they’d be making headway on the SSA list. Snopes has a nice article on the phenomenon.
Hunsdon says: Helen:
Once I started looking at it, neither way looked right, “Camaro” looked almost as silly as “Camero.” Either way, better’n a Trans-Am!
Hunsdon says: JLF mentioned the Speaker of the House of Commons during the Puritan Commonwealth, Praise God Barebones.
Hunsdon noted that Nicholas If-Christ-had- not-died-for- thee-thou-hadst- been-damned Barbon (or Barebones) was Praise-God’s son.
Ethan C. says: I really don’t mind unusual names — so long as their pronunciation is obvious. The real problem is when a name is both unfamiliar and unphonetic, so that no one in will ever be able to get it right the first time. What must that do to a person’s psyche?
David J. White says: You don’t see a lot of kids named Wilson or MacDougal
I’m with you on MacDougal, but I’ve had several students named Wilson.
But until I moved to Texas, I’d never had a student named Travis. So there are some names that have regional popularity, I think.
Richard Johnson 
Unusual baby names are no longer unusual.
Whether this a good thing or not, I’ll leave to others. But my children’s peers include many foreign-born children (or children born to foreign parents), children born to hippies and other counterculture folks, and so on; that nothing seems to be strange or worthy of ridicule.
Even naming a boy “Sue” probably won’t raise eyebrows. If nothing else, he can have a fine career as a lawyer.
Maybe if someone named their kid “f*cknuts” or something, but “Neon” or “Turbo” sound like they would be right at home in the Palin household.
And “Navaryous” sounds like a jazz musician I might enjoy.