Name Calling

Parents can be so cruel. It seems that some folks are just genetically inclined to serve an “all you can eat and then some” banquet of humiliation to their kids and then pretend that its cute. I know a guy named Jacob Jacobs. Why would you do that? As a parent, you would think that you would want your kid to succeed in life and give him or her any possible advantage available. A good name can actually change someone’s first impression of you.

Think about it. Would you, as a man, be more inclined to go to a brand new band performance if the band was named “Overkill” instead of “Goody Gosh?” Not that “Goody Gosh” is a bad band, mind you. The lead singer’s name is Luger Stonecock, which kind of makes up for their band’s name. In fact, they should just change their name to “Stonecock” or some derivative of it. Without knowing about Luger, though, I’d be heading to an evening performance of “Overkill,” which proves my point.

Even if you have a cool name, your parents can easily bung it up by labeling you with a ridiculous nickname. I have proved myself to be no exception to the propensity towards this particular brand of sadism. My son’s name is Trevor Micah. Even without the surname, you have to agree that it’s a good name. If you don’t then you’re wrong. A recent governmental survey brought to you by The Letters “A” and “R” and The Number “6” showed that 98% of the people polled agreed that “Trevor Micah” was a formula for success. The other 2% were unable to respond due to illness, incarceration and, in one case, because the person in question was dead.

My daughter was completely uninterested in self-manufactured waste products. She trained for the toilet fairly early in life, but when in diapers she would do her business and then go about her day. Not so with my son. Trevor delights in working his Houdini-emulating skills to the effect of removing his diaper and then playing Mr. Wizard with whatever he finds therein. I once found him with a fist-sized ball of poo. We’re not talking Trevor’s fist, we talking Andre the Giant with elephantiasis of the hand size. He had broken parts of it off and managed to get it between his toes, leaving an Oregon Trail of feces across our front room carpet.

Stupefied by simultaneously being appallingly disgusted and incredulously exasperated (a state that only parents of a poop-infatuated child can comprehend), I blurted out, “AH! Yucky! You’re getting a bath, Mr. Turds.”

Like the clinging remnants of a fully digested dinner on my offspring’s foot, the name stuck. Even my wife has been caught quite unabashedly calling our son “Mr. Turds.” It has a certain ring to it, you see. Sure, it’s funny. Go ahead and laugh at Mr. Turds. I even like typing it, but now it’s his, you see. 14 years from now when I drop him off at his first school dance with his first date, imagine the horror he’ll feel when I say, “Cut a rug, Mr. Turds!” Not a very good situation for him, is it?

Okay, so I most likely won’t refer to him as that name in a few years or even months from now, but some names stick for life. We called Kenneth Smith “Ox” all through high school because when he fell down the stairs into the kitchen, his mother told him to “be careful, you great ox.” Of course, his older brother called him many other things, but “Ox” might as well have been Kenny’s legal name. Remind me to tell you about Kenny and the trumpet some day.

In any case, I’m sure you can see what I mean about labels. No one is going to eat a can of “Campbell’s Machine-Squared Farm Leftovers,” they’re going to eat “Chunky Soup.” So be nice to your kids (and others’ kids for that matter) and give them good names at birth and keep the nicknames fairly unobtrusive.