Meet Doctor Fear

When I was a kid, I and a friend of mine spent hours thinking up strange names that might actually exist, looking them up in the phone book, and then prank calling them. The best ones we ever came up with in our town were “Otto Graf” and “Iona Appl”. When I had my wisdom teeth extracted, I went to Dr. Fear (I highly recommend him!), who shares an office with Dr. Hitchcock (there are apparently lots of others with awkward names for their profession). Later in life, when I thought about what I would name my kids, I thought that with the last name Gray it might be fun to name them after paint chits. I decided on “Gun Metal” for a boy, and “Ash” for a girl. I’d never do this of course, but I’ve always wondered whether it was cruelty or obliviousness that leads people to give their kids the kinds of names discussed in this BBC News article, or collected in lists like this. And then there are business names and web addresses. I wonder if the web person over at the non-profit “Childrens Laughter” was laughing himself as he bought ChildrenSlaughter.com? This kind of thing is a little less surprising when there’s a language barrier, but this list of brand launch mistakes in other countries is still kind of amusing. Have any amusing name stories of your own to share?