Kall Me Klaudia

I just called the local YMCA a few minutes ago to sign the short one up for a "Tumble Bugs" class starting in September (yes, I know she didn't master a single skill in the last class, but at least she has fun when she wastes our money). I gave the nice lady my name. And then the nice lady on the phone asked me, "Is that Claudia with a K or a C?" What the? The thing is, this is not the first time I have been asked this. The lady told me that her granddaughter is named Klaudia. It's an abomination, I tell you.

My name has been passed down in my family for several generations (from a great-grandfather named Claude to my grandmother to me). It's a classic Latin name. To spell it with a K is to spark the downfall of civilization.

If you've never visited the classic site "Baby's Named a Bad Bad Thing (a Primer on Parent Cruelty)," you gotta check it out: http://notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/

There is nothing I can say about the recent trend towards saddling kids with unspellable, unpronounceable, ridiculous names that hasn't already been said on that site. It's a fun read.

I thought long and hard about the name I gave my daughter. I ended up choosing a feminine name that has been around for a long time, and I went with the traditional spelling. Other names I considered were Eliza and Evelyn. Someday, when she is older, she'll be sitting in the waiting room at her doctor's office and when the nurse calls her name she'll recognize her own name and respond accordingly. The poor nurse doesn't have to stand there and stumble over Mykinzieh or some crap.

I feel sorry for teachers, too. Holy cow, I don't know how they can say some of these names with a straight face. I visit a parenting message board and I saw one child's name that took me 15 minutes to figure out. I finally sounded it out and realized that it was Kennedy, but it was spelled with lots of C's and Y's and had lots of other consonants in it that didn't belong there. Don't even get me started on the trend of giving last names as first names. Remember in the movie Splash when the mermaid made up her own name? She looked up and saw a street sign. "Madison," she said. See, that was really funny at the time because NOBODY would ever be named Madison, right?

I'm done. Klaudia out.

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