Silly First Name Syndrome

This small kid is lucky to be alive:

Gnarley is his name, and he certainly lived up to it yesterday, “surfing” a vehicle down Golden Bay’s Takaka Hill.

The parents of the adventurous Takaka Hill toddler turned stowaway are relieved to have him back safe and sound.

Two-year-old Gnarley Maguire hitched a ride in his grandfather’s trailer for 20 kilometres, from the hill’s summit to Motueka.

A truck driver spotted him in the trailer with a 1.2-metre-high cage, winding its way down the steep Takaka Hill road, and followed him to Motueka.

He asked Gnarley’s grandfather, who had stopped at the town’s Placemakers store, if he knew he had a child in his trailer.

He didn’t.

Here is the chart that shows the propensity of Silly First Name Syndrome to occur:

Shelley Bridgeman writes about Silly First name Syndrome:

It’s official. A study has discovered that the name you bestow on your newborn can affect its future. Who would have thought? You mean to say twins called Benson and Hedges might stand out from their peers – and not in a good way? So inventing names, mangling spellings and inserting random apostrophes are inadvisable? Gosh, we learn something new every day.

Most new parents appear to fall into one of two camps. There are the traditionalists who want a nice, normal name that no one will bat an eyelid at. Hello Sarah, Elizabeth, William and Jack. Then there are the people determined to be original and stand out from the crowd. Like television characters Kath and Kim, they consider “unusual” to be a desirable attribute.

“Oh, yes, that’s noice, different, unusual,” they say about Sativa-Rochee, KleeShay and Qba (names I encountered on Trade Me’s Parenting message-board).

I must belong to the first group because the simplicity of a regular name appeals to me. I’m not inclined to inflict a child with a lifelong need to clarify the spelling – or worse, the pronunciation – of their name. Don’t think I’m deriding cultural names or prized family names here; it’s the creation of one-of-a-kind, plucked-out-of-thin-air names to which I am drawing attention.

Stuff carries a list of the names some people tried to inflict upon their children.

Do they not know the tragedy of Silly First name Syndrome?

Parents who tried to name their child Mafia No Fear are among hundreds who had their choice of name rejected in the past decade.

Justice was the most popular disallowed name, with royal titles, religious references and punctuation marks among names parents tried to bestow upon children.

A child and family psychologist who has even seen children named after illicit drugs says parents need to be more careful about stigmatising their kids.

A list provided by the Internal Affairs Department shows 350 parents had the names they chose for their offspring rejected in the 10 years ending June 30, 2011.

The list of disallowed names follows the release of the most popular names for 2011 – Liam and Ruby – this week. The most popular rejected name was Justice – 49 people tried to name their child that, along with alternate spellings Justus and Juztice.

Royal titles featured heavily – King, Prince, Princess, Knight, Queen, Queen V, Queen Victoria, Lord, Lady, Baron and Duke were all rejected as were Royal, Royale, Majesty and Majesti. Religious references Messiah, Christ, Bishop, Saint and Lucifer didn’t make the cut either.

Mafia No Fear, Anal, V8, single letters, the Roman numerals I, II, III, punctuation symbols * . and / and titles such as President, Emperor, Chief, Constable, Sargent and General were also rejected.

The Pope won’t do anything about his priests buggering boys in the past but he is prepared to make a stand on Silly First Name Syndrome:

This week the Pope declared war on parents naming babies after celebrities, fruit or popular sports cars. In an address to parents, the ever-progressive pontiff pleaded with worshipers to ‘give your children names that are in the Christian calendar’. So Apple, Brooklyn and Ferrari are out, Francisco and Giulia are in.

The post then goes on to list some banned names and makes the following comment about New Zealand:

1) Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii (New Zealand)
New Zealand law bans names which could cause offence to a ‘reasonable’ person. Good thing too – the country is a stupid name hotspot. We found a couple from the islands who tried and failed to call their son ’4Real’, but nothing beats the ridiculous moniker above. It belonged to a 9-year-old girl before a judge had her renamed during a custody battle. ‘It makes a fool of the child,’ he said. It certainly made application forms a pain in the butt.

Has New Zealand banned any other names? Oh yes. The judge listed some that were also blocked: Fish and Chips (twins), Yeah Detroit, Keenan Got Lucy and Sex Fruit. Number 16 Bus Shelter and Violence were allowed.

I note too that Denmark has made a stand about the frippery of double-barreled surnames, like Lees-Galloway and the such.

Yet another dog attack that Nanaia Mahuta said wouldn’t happen after dogs were chipped:

“The changes are aimed at better dog control, such as addressing dog attacks on people and, as often happens in rural areas, dog attacks on other people’s stock. Any dog can potentially bite – even family pets.”

That is what she said in 2006 when sponsoring the dog-chipping law. Like Sue Bradford’s anti-smacking law it hasn’t worked as it was intended. It was spurious then and it is spurious now to suggest that chipped dogs are safer and child abuse will stop because of silly misguided laws.

A 15-month-old boy was savaged by a pitbull as he wandered into the dog’s yard to play with a Christmas present he had received hours earlier.

The vicious Christmas Day mauling of Ozyris Beeching – whose family say he is lucky to be alive – came after the local council had been warned several times about the dog’s temperament, his distraught mother told the Herald yesterday.

Tracy Beeching said her family were getting ready to drive a few blocks across Edgecumbe in the Bay of Plenty for a Christmas breakfast with her brother’s family when little Ozyris wandered next door with his new toy lawnmower.

He entered the front yard shortly before 10.30am and came within reach of the tethered pitbull, which attacked the infant, biting him on his face and stomach.

Nanaia Mahuta needs to get in her car and drive down tot he Bay of Plenty and go and apologise that her law hasn’t stopped another child being mauled by a dog. She would have been far better sponsoring a law to stop people having silly first names…it may have saved this child.

Regular readers and loyal Army members know that I regularly feature stories of those afflicted with Silly First Name Syndrome. The Herald has an article with some boffin proving that the syndrome exists and is dangerous.

Prospective parents, beware – what you name your baby could negatively affect their future.

“Name your kids what you love, but be aware there are consequences,” David Figlio, an economics and education professor at Northwestern University, told Time.

Figlio found that, across all races and ethnicities, there are certain letter combinations that are more likely to be given by high school dropouts, for example, than mothers who have completed school.

Among caucasian families, Alexandra may be spelled Alekzandra; the “kz” combination is almost never seen in middle-class families. For African Americans, it may mean use of the prefix “Sha” rather than the more highly regarded “La.”

Teachers treat children with “linguistically low-status” names differently to their peers – they are more likely to be referred for special education, less likely to be recognized as gifted and they perform poorer on tests, according to America’s National Bureau of Economic Research.

Names may even effect children’s career paths. When Figlio studied sisters who were both good at maths, he found that those with more linguistically feminine names were more likely to shy away from maths and science and stick with humanities classes compared to their siblings with linguistically androgynous names.

And Figlio warns against giving your son a girlie-sounding name: according to Figlio’s 2006 study in Education Finance and Policy, boys with names such as Ashley, Shannon, Jamie and Courtney tend to have more behaviour problems at intermediate school.

There is a whole heap of hurt in this article. The poor guy was doomed, his girlfriend’s name was danger enough but when they picked the name for the kid that sealed his fate.

Zekaiya Biddle has the eyes and chin of a father she will never meet.

Hugh Biddle, 17, was buried in a landslide at his Ohope Beach home, leaving behind his pregnant girlfriend Cherize Kutia, 16.

After a 12-hour labour, Cherize gave birth to a 3.8kg baby girl 10 days ago, 103 days after Hugh’s death.

They chose the name together, and Cherize says she sees her late boyfriend every time she looks into her daughter’s eyes.

I had a conversation with another blogger about the likelihood of another maori child being based to death by the end of January. We both reckoned iPredict wouldn’t even offer stocks on that, since it was a near certainty.

Unfortunately we were both proved right.

A five-month-old baby who died in an alleged manslaughter in Hastings last week has been named.

Mikara Ranui Jarius Reti, of Flaxmere, was admitted to Hawkes Bay Regional Hospital last Tuesday night and “subsequently died”, police said.

A 21-year-old man, who has name suppression, has been charged with manslaughter.

He is due to appear in the Hastings District Court tomorrow.

Senior Sergeant Dave de Lange said members of the Mikara’s family had been “co-operative and helpful” with a police investigation.

Three things strike me here. First is of course the occurrence once again of Silly First Name Syndrome. If these people took even as much care of the child as they do in giving them stupid names then we would be a whole lot better off and the children may well be alive.

The second thing is we have a 21 year male, not from the family by the looks of the press details. Judith Collins in her Summer Series interview likened this to being the same as Tom Cats going around killing the offspring of other fathers.

“Vio­lent offender who acts very much like a tom­cat and goes around basically killing the young of the pre­vi­ous partner”.

I have coined a new syndrome for this:

SOCKS – Some Other C*nts Kid Syndrome, an affliction that sees the SOCK victim brutally killed by another male involved with the family.

The third thing is that the alleged animal who beat this child to death has name suppression but yet again the victim does not. The law is ass-backwards and clearly criminal friendly.

Of course the liberal hand-wringers like Rosemary McLeod will say it is whitey’s fault and society’s fault, and haters and wreckers like Hone Harawira will just blame whitey, but at some point Maori are going to have to own their own sh*t, because with all the vast sums of money pouring into their laps they still seem overly represented in all the wrong statistics. At some point we as a nation have to say money isn’t working, time to turn the tap off.

Ask Rosemary McLeod, if she cares about Blanket Man so much would she shower. clothe and take him to Shed 5 for lunch? Thought not, so she should STFU. Caring is what “other people” do. The fact she got paid to write that drivel just galls me, if Steve Braunias has to go then it is high time she crawled back into what ever liberal elitist tent she came from and then the Sunday Star Times can have some columnists with a grasp on reality.

Brutal killings of children require brutal solutions and brutal honesty. Sue Bradford said that these children were going to be protected, in actual fact it looks more like they are being killed in increasing numbers since her law was brought in. She lied to the nation and criminalised good parents in the process.

The latest tragedy of the killing of small child by someone who was supposed to care for her has again highlighted the tragedy that is also Silly First name Syndrome.

Five-year-old Sahara Jayde Baker-Koro was found dead in her bed in Napier early on Tuesday.

A 24-year-old man has been charged with assault in relation to her death, and is likely to face more serious charges in the New Year.

He appeared in the Napier District Court this week, and was granted interim name suppression and remanded in custody until next month.

Sahara lived at the house with her mother, 7-year-old sister and 2-year-old brother.

Police have refused to reveal the 24-year-old’s relationship to the family, or say whether he was living at the house.

Has anyone wondered the irony of the situation where we know the name of the dead victim, but the coward accused of this crime is still afraid of his own name and has continued name suppression. The name suppression can’t be to protect the identity of the victim, she’s dead and her photo is splashed all over the paper. It is a pity that the accused’s photo isn’t splashed all over the internet and newspapers too.

I know it sounds cruel to look at their names but the evidence is over whelming. To my knowledge there hasn’t been a Brian or a Thomas or an Annie or a Catherine bashed to death by their care givers.

There has been a Sahara, Lillybing, Cru, Cris, Cezar, Duwayne, Kash, Hail-Sage,  Jayrhis, and Cher­ish­sil­iala. The other thing in common that no-one is allowed to say, but this blogger will, is that all of those kids were Maori.

Maybe the French are onto something in having a register of officially acceptable names. For the children above the child abuse really started the moment they were named, and continued until they were dead. Not many made it to 6 years old. In a way you could simply explain it all away by describing the slaughter of Maori young as simply late term abortions for playthings that became annoying and boring for the adults involved. The law draws the line at 23 weeks for abortion, it seems there is an element in society that draws the line at about 6 years old.

Society has an illness, and like an illness you need to treat it. But like an infected foot, you treat the foot not chop off an arm to help the foot and that is where it all goes wrong with society.Society does need to own this problem, but the part of society that so clearly and demonstrably has the problem has to own it more. If we don’t then the slaughter of Maori children will continue.

The truly sad thing is that the previous government, Sue Bradford and even John Key voted for a law that was supposed to “save the kiddies”. Instead of focusing on stopping smacking the government really should have banned Silly First Names, I bet the effects would have been a whole lot more tangible than the failure that is Sue Bradford’s law. There should be a Wall of Shame built in Sue Bradford’s dis-honour and every child bashed to death by “care-givers” should have their name inscribed upon it as a testimony to hand-wringing do-gooder meddling that failed.