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Baby Name News: New Zealand Cracks Down on Strange Monikers for Kids
July 20th, 2011
Photography by Jim Hammer via Flickr (CC)
There have been some unique celebrity baby names making headlines this summer—Harper Seven and Bingham Hawn Bellamy are two of the latest—but you won’t find such unusual names in New Zealand any time soon. The country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages is rejecting names that are a little too out there, according to a new report by The Globe and Mail.
We’re not talking Kal-El and Pilot Inspektor, but rather names like “Duke,” “Knight” and even “Lucifer,” all of which made the list of 102 names that the registrar has rejected in the past two years. And it’s not just names that the registrar is banning; if you were considering using an asterisk in your child’s name, you’re out of luck.
Do you agree with the idea of rejecting certain baby names (e.g. “Number 16 Bus Shelter”—which, incidentally, was approved by the agency in 2008)? Or do you think that parents should have the right to name their child whatever they want?
Copyright © 2012 St. Joseph Media. All Rights Reserved.
As a supply teacher, I tend to agree with this. Kids have enough things to deal with growing up, why would you give them a weird name? It’s impossible to pronounce half the names on the class list correctly these days! Parents also show their lack of knowledge of phonics when they use unique spellings of names.