name regret

[Michael Newman]

I had a Dominican student once who told me that her name, Sdelimira, "violates phonotactic constraints."  (It was supposed to have been "Edelmira," which in Dominican spanish would be a homophonous spelling with Sdelmira. She blamed the municipal clerk. )



Michael Newman
Associate Professor of Linguistics
Queens College/CUNY
michael.newman at qc.cuny.edu



On Oct 14, 2011, at 6:32 PM, Ronald Butters wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ronald Butters <ronbutters at AOL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: name regret
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> What percent regret the dorky name that they gave their children? (E.g., RONALD REAGAN JONES might cause his parents to have deep remorse for inflicting such an uncool name on one who grew up to be a trendy professor of literature at Yale.)
> On Oct 14, 2011, at 9:17 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> Seems like this should be "Namers' Remorse".
>>
>> LH
>>
>> On Oct 14, 2011, at 8:01 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>
>>> Eight percent of U.S. parents regret the "cool" name they gave baby:
>>>
>>> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/10/baby-name-mistakes-tenth-_n_1003279.html
>>>
>>>
>>> JL
>>>
>>> --
>>> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>>>
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>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
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>
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