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    What Not to Name Your Baby
    What Not to Name Your Baby
    What Not to Name Your Baby
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    What Not to Name Your Baby

    By Joe Borgenicht

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    About this ebook

    The perfect antidote to the boring baby-naming books -- a hilarious guide for expecting parents on what NOT to name their baby!

    What better way to choose the perfect name than by ruling out those names that are off-limits?

    Joe Borgenicht offers more than a thousand names, complete with pronunciation and definitions, that absolutely, positively cannot be used for a child. But don't worry, there are exceptions to the rules, and a lot of names will work just fine, especially if there's something wrong with you. Sections of the book include: "Movie Mania" (Morhpeus, Maverick, and Starsky); "It's the 21st Century: Move On!" (Murray, Irving, and Ethel); and "Shop at the Mall, Not the Nursery" (Timberland, Lucky, and Armani). There are hilarious sidebars and lists, like: "Infamous Dictators" (Saddam, Benito, and Manuel); "Famous Sidekicks" (Robin, Tonto, and Garfunkel); and "First Voted Off the Island" Survivors (Sonja, Debb, and Peter); and more!

    We've all heard the bad ones: Moon Unit (Zappa), Sailor Lee (Brinkley), Chastity (Bono). With an edgy and often politically incorrect sense of humor, What Not to Name Your Baby is certain to help expecting parents be creative, without scarring their child for life -- at least not with a name.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGallery Books
    Release dateMay 11, 2010
    ISBN9781439114841
    What Not to Name Your Baby
    Author

    Joe Borgenicht

    Joe Borgenicht is the author of numerous books, including The Baby Owner's Manual and What Not to Name Your Baby.

    Read more from Joe Borgenicht

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    • 2/5
      Quite superficial and ... well, common sense. Worth a laugh or two at most.

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    What Not to Name Your Baby - Joe Borgenicht

    what NOT to name your baby

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    Also by JOE BORGENICHT

    The Baby Owner’s Manual (with Louis Borgenicht)

    The Action Hero’s Handbook (with David Borgenicht)

    The Action Heroine’s Handbook (with Jennifer Worick)

    Doggy Days (with Melanie Borgenicht)

    The Reality TV Handbook (with John Saade)

    Undercover Golf (with Richard Robinson)

    SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

    An imprint of Simon & Schuster

    1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

    www.SimonandSchuster.com

    Text copyright © 2005 by True West Productions, Inc.

    All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

    SIMON SPOTLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT and related logo are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

    Manufactured in the U.S.A.

    First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Borgenicht, Joe.

    What not to name your baby / by Joe Borgenicht.—1st ed.

    p. cm.

    ISBN 0-689-87581-9

    ISBN 978-0-6898-7581-6

    ISBN 978-1-4391-1484-1

    1. Names, Personal—Humor. I. Title.

    PN6231.N24B67 2005 818′.602—dc22   2004023926

    acknowledgments

    Thanks first and foremost to my crack team of corporate researchers: Evan Labb, Laura Kvinge, Ryan Lufkin, and Ms. Ceri Jones. Without you there would be no book—and without the book, you would have had a lot more time to kill. Thanks also to Tucker Fudpucker for writing the foreword and sharing the pain of his childhood and current life with our readers (my apologies to the U.K. Tucker Fudpucker whom I prank called when visiting the country back in ’83). Endless thanks to Ryan Harbage and Jen Bergstrom for making this book a reality. And finally, thanks to my wife, Baby Love, son, Bugs, and dog, Satie-Face, for not disowning me for my inability to invent armor-clad nicknames for all three of them.

    table of contents

    Foreword by Tucker Fudpucker

    Introduction

    New Rules for Antinaming

    The Rule of 3

    Mr. and Mrs. Popular (Jenny, Joe, and John)

    Clevur Speling (Genni, Jho, and Jawn)

    Boys with the Boys, Girls with the Girls (A Boy Named Sue)

    Movie Mania (Morpheus, Maverick, and Starsky)

    Reverse Assimilation (Habib Jones, Devavaniprveshka Smith)

    They’re Inanimate Objects for a Reason (Cole, Ash, and Oyl)

    Overanimated (Birch, Dawg, and Johnson)

    City Search (Dakota, Cheyenne, and Portland)

    It’s the Twenty-first Century: Move On! (Murray, Irving, and Ethel)

    For the Love of God (Jesus, Mary, and Joseph)

    Shop at the Mall, Not the Nursery (Timberland, Lucky, and Armani)

    Sweet Emotion (Hope, Chastity, and Sincerity)

    Just Don’t Do It: The List

    Boys’ Names

    Girls’ Names

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1900s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1910s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1920s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1930s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1940s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1950s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1960s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1970s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1980s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 1990s (Boys/Girls)

    The Most Unpopular Names of 2000 (Boys/Girls)

    Popular Names in Hungary

    Popular Names in Guam, Micronesia, and the South Pacific

    Famous Plumbers

    Famous Sidekicks

    Death Row Inmates/Serial Killers

    The Jenny Census

    Bart Simpson Prank Calls

    Infamous Dictators

    First-One-Voted-Off-the-Island Survivors

    foreword

    A Fudpucker by any other name …

    It’s bad enough that my dad’s side of the family had to endure a surname like ours. But when he and mom decided to try to cancel out the pain of being born a Fudpucker by naming me Tucker, they were horribly misguided.

    When it comes to naming … no wrongs make a right.

    Take it from me. The wrong name will doom your child for life. I started out all right until my mother stopped homeschooling me in the fourth grade. She said, Tucker Fudpucker, it’s time for you to face the world. Until that time I had no idea there was anything wrong with my name. In fact, due to my somewhat sheltered childhood, I entered the fourth grade thinking that everyone was a Fudpucker (we had lots of cousins who also had to eat their daily dose of Prozac candy).

    When I was thirteen, I graduated from the sixth grade. It wasn’t because my mother’s homeschooling wasn’t sufficient. (In fact, Mom had me on the fast track for Harvard). Rather, my education came to a standstill when I entered public school. I was caught in a daily quagmire. I would return home from school—in tears—and explain to my mother that some of the kids at school had rearranged the first letters of my first and last names. Every time I said the F-word to explain what they said, I got my mouth rinsed with soap.

    My bar mitzvah wasn’t any better. When the cantor sang my call to read the Torah (my name in Hebrew is pronounced TZUH-ker PHUD-puh-kher) the entire synagogue burst into laughter and didn’t stop until all of the schnapps and herring were gone. You’d think I’d have developed a thicker skin. But it never goes away.

    I’m just as guilty as anybody. When I went away to college I unofficially changed my name to Joe. There were fewer jokes, but I found myself making up for all of the fun that was made of me by judging other people’s names. Once I went on a blind date with a woman named Xochilt (pronounced SO-chee). When I asked her what her name meant, she said, It’s Aztec, for flower. Oh, I said. Well, my name’s Joe. It’s American, for coffee.

    All my life I suppose I’ve been sabotaging relationships like that. There’s only been one woman who stuck by me after she learned that her possible married name could be Fudpucker. And that was sweet Chastity … the one that got away. She would have accepted the name Chastity Fudpucker. In her line of work as a professional dancer, her real last name didn’t matter much. We would have gone all the way, too, if it hadn’t been for her friends Star, Octavia, and Pleasure. One night Chastity and I were in a special room—so special in fact, the owners had named it The Champagne Room—and Star, Octavia, and Pleasure found out what my last name was. They stopped dancing and started in, just like everybody else. Chastity tried to stick up for me, but the peer pressure was too much. (Plus, whenever I ran out of cash, she always got a little moody for some reason.) I never saw her again.

    I guess you could say I’ve found my niche, now. The asbestos factory is a pretty good place to work since none of the other employees speak English. Oh, don’t get me wrong, occasionally I overhear a couple of them snickering a Fudpucker or two. But they never say anything to my face.

    If I had any advice, it would be this: Stick with the standards, spell it like it is, and at all costs avoid rhyming.

    Sincerely,

    Tucker Fudpucker

    introduction

    One of the greatest challenges new parents will face (pre-baby) is finding the right name, with the right rhythm, that the fewest number of school children could potentially make fun of. To aid in this challenge there are numerous books and Web sites available that can help you name your child by offering meaning, metaphor, genealogy, religion, race, and pop icon background, among other things.

    But now, there is a new essential standard in baby naming: what not to name your baby! Think about it (particularly if you have a couple of the 35,000 name books). How are you going to sift through all of that? Granted, you’ve got a nine-month lead time, but still …

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