How’s Baby Caoimhe? Is She Pronouncing Her Name Yet?

               Joe Bob's America  10/11/21

By Joe Bob Briggs

    NEW YORK—Every year the Social Security Administration publishes a list of the most popular baby names.

    And let’s just stop right there for a minute. The Social Security Administration is supposed to be solely concerned with old age. Why are they hanging around the nursery? If a baby is not likely to inherit millions of dollars or commit any criminal acts (to quote the Larry Cohen poster, “There’s only one thing wrong with the Davis baby—IT’S ALIVE!”), then why does it need a Social Security number? If the government wants to squelch insane conspiracy theories, they should probably start by restricting the use of the Social Security number. It’s for collecting your pension and not anything else, right? I mean, the FDR administration had to convince people to sign up for it because a large part of the population thought it was some sort of socialist plot to keep track of your private life.

    Of course, we have 86 years of Social Security usage now and so we can rest assured that . . . IT WAS A PLOT TO KEEP TRACK OF OUR PRIVATE LIVES.

    Babies don’t need Social Security numbers.

    Anyway, I apparently digressed before I told you the topic of the article. That may be my new record for early digression.

    My point is this: Baby-naming has become an insane form of public showboating.

    As in, “You think your baby has a cool name? My baby is named Zyair.”

    Because—you would know this if you’re following the annual Social Security reports—“Zyair” is skyrocketing in baby-name popularity even though nobody is completely sure what it means. Some think it’s a misspelling of the African nation of Zaire. Some says it’s Arabic. Some say it’s Spanish, although that vowel “y” bothers me. Then again, I don’t know how it’s pronounced so maybe it’s a consonant “y.” Various reports credit the name with having the meanings of “unlimited happiness,” “gift,” “king,” “ruler,” and “river.” Of the five choices, I would think river is the most likely, since it would explain how it remained local for millions of years and then exploded onto the scene in 2021 America. I wonder, though, if the parents considered the side effects of naming your baby a word that starts with “Zy.”

    Newborn Zyairs of the world, you are destined for the last desk in the classroom! Start dealing with it now.

    Actually the top ten boys’ names and the top ten girls’ names don’t change that much from year to year—although they’re not the names you would expect. Mary doesn’t even break into the top fifty, but Harper is number 10. Nancy has apparently left the building. On the boys’ side, Liam is number 1 and William is number 5—isn’t that the same name? Thomas and Charles, which you would pick to be pretty damn popular, are numbers 45 and 46, respectively.

    Redneck names are gaining in popularity, especially the ones that go back to the original Gaelic in Scotland and Ireland. Declan is incredibly hot. Saoirse and Caoimhe, which you would expect to die out somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley around, oh, 1730, are making a comeback. There are apparently people out there who think the Scots-Irish are cool again.

    All this is evidence of a civilization with way too much time on its hands. People spend at least nine months picking out names—and some spend more, as in “Let’s have a baby and named him Ahsoka!” followed by “No, let’s have a girl and name her Amadala!” followed by “I think you have to pay a royalty to Disney on every birthday for any Star Wars character name. It’s like having student loans from the age of zero.”

     What was wrong with the original naming system? You waited til the baby existed, you looked at it, then you named it.

    For example, the name Calvin—it means bald. Of course, many babies are bald—but not as many as you would think. If you really look objectively at babies, a lot of em look like elderly carnival workers and slope-headed aliens. This is how you end up with names like Cletis. Nobody goes into pregnancy expecting to give birth to a Cletis, that’s a baby that got named on Day Three of life at the county charity hospital.

    Babies don’t look young until later. The first couple of weeks, if we were being honest, we would sometimes say, “Well, what is it?”

    The name Cameron means “crooked nose.” The name Linda means “weak.” The name Barbara means “foreign female,” indicating there may have been some discussion of just where the spermatozoa for this birth came from, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

    The name Karen—which, let’s face it, is not gonna be used for at least the next twenty years—actually means “pure.”

    Paul means small. George means farmer. Deborah means bee. (I gotta think you use this one when you get that cross between a Pekingese and a cantaloupe that defines some babies. They have a perpetual constipated squint.) Dennis means “orgy lover,” so be careful with that one. Frances just means “French person.”

    In some cases the original baby was just born somewhere odd and so the name was taken from the locale. Kimberly is the town in South Africa where all the intense fighting occurred during the Boer War. Kevin is a version of a river that runs through Glasgow.

    One reason I think people are going back to the redneck names from Scotland and Ireland is that they’re unisex. Two advantages here. Numero Uno, you can choose the name without having one of those “gender reveal” parties where stunt pilots collide in mid-air and the exploding cake device kills seven family members. Numero Two-o, by giving your kid a gender-neutral name, you’re Super Woke. This is especially true if it’s a girl, which is why I would recommend Final Girl names:

Jess from Black Christmas

Sidney from Scream

Chris from Friday the 13th 3-D

Dana from The Cabin in the Woods

Sam from Fear Street Part 3

Stretch from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2

    Or if that’s too meta for you, just go with the thousand-year-old standards: Nighean, Brochan, Callum, Camdan, Kendrix, Hamish, Neilan, Leathan, Teigue, Pherson or Alasdair.

    Social scientists at a university in Jerusalem recently released a study to determine whether the name you’re given at birth affects your behavior, social characteristics and physicality. Their answer was, “Decidedly yes.”

    And this is good news. It means that twenty years from now we’re gonna have a whole passel of clog-dancing hillbilly fiddlers keeping the whiskey business healthy.