The Essential Guide To Picking A Weird Name For Your Kid

Are you planning on giving birth, adopting, or flat out stealing a baby in 2012? If so, you should probably start worrying about whether the wee one’s name will be as weird as the names that all the other parents are giving their kids.

The Huffington Post reports that new parents will be following some oddly specific guidelines as they choose names for their offspring in 2012. Among them: names inspired by cardinal directions, aggressive animals, adjectives, and amoral television characters. Does this mean that kindergarten teachers can expect classrooms full of Westons, Wolfs, Goldens, and Arlos before this decade is through? Not if prospective parents follow these even weirder baby name guidelines.

Made up words that sound like Latin words that might mean “strong.”
Parents want their children to someday strike fear into the hearts of everyone who doesn’t know that their kid’s name is a made up word. Gaudimium. Teneous. Maxteriuous. Obviously this name trend is for boys only; everyone knows that girls hate both doing math and being seen as strong and capable.

The name of your favorite dead pet.
Giving your kid a golden retriever name like Hunter or Tracker is so 2004. In the future, parents will take inspiration from all of their pets. Try giving the wee one a cat name like Fluffy or Snowball. Or a gerbil name like Chewmonster.

The hottest letter of the alphabet isn’t a letter at all, but a confusing symbol.
Parent site Nameberry seems to think that A is the hottest vowel and M the hottest consonant, but truly edgy parents will be inserting foreign characters into their children’s names next year. Cîndy. Ñathañiel. Bürt.

Naming things like Bentley is out; naming kids after fictional butlers is in.
Apparently people aren’t naming their kids stuff like Grantley and Flatley and Ridley anymore. Thanks to the recession, the newest hipster parent trend will be ironically naming one’s child after a fictional manservant. Godfrey. Jeeves. Fauntleroy. That way, the kid grows up knowing he’s expected to pull his weight around the house, now that the actual housekeeper had to be fired after Mom got laid off from her job at an independent publishing house.

Prevent future nerdy careers by naming your offspring after a high falutin word for something bad.
In this age of reality TV stardom, you don’t want your kid to grow up to be something lame like a scientist. Bacterium. Cachexy. Podagra. Marburg. They’ll most surely be shamed by the dorks.

So, get on it, new parents. Otherwise, it’s possible we might someday have a President with a first name that ends in “-ayden.”