The Worst Baby Name Choices … Ever

They say that money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy unhappiness for a baby boy. Meet Goldenpalacedotcom Silverman, a New Jersey boy who is lugging around the name of an online casino. The Silvermans accepted an offer of $15,000 to name their newborn son after the website in 2005. The casino is famous for similar stunts, including paying adults to also change their name and have the site’s Web address tattooed on their foreheads. So it’s some comfort to young GoldenPalaceDotCom that he’s not the only one out there.

Photo via Sodahead.com

There’s really no worse reason for a baby name than to pay tribute to the evilest man of the 20th century. Self-styled white supremacists Heath and Deborah Campbell named their first male child Adolf Hitler after the genocidal Nazi dictator. When a local Wal-Mart refused to personalize Adolf’s cake for his third birthday, it kicked off a firestorm of controversy that eventually resulted in the boy and his two younger sisters (one of whom was named Jocelynn Aryan Nation Campbell) being removed from the parents’ custody.

When Marissa Pena and Emanuel Vega got together, they found they had everything in common—except football teams. Pena was a lifelong Dallas Cowboys fan, while Vega was equally passionate about the Washington Redskins. When the two teams faced off on Thanksgiving Day of 2012, the couple made it exciting with a little wager: if the Cowboys won, the baby in Marissa’s belly would be named after a Cowboys player, and vice versa for the Redskins. Needless to say, Washington took the game and the little one was dubbed Robert Griffin Vega after the team’s quarterback.

Here’s another high-tech baby name that probably should have been left in the alternates pile. When Israeli couple Lior and Vardit Adler discovered that they were expecting a baby girl, they explored a wide selection of names from all the world’s languages before settling on “Like.” Yes … she was named after that ubiquitous interaction on Facebook that has become a daily ritual. There was a baby born in Egypt earlier in 2011 named “Facebook” in honor of the site’s vital help in organizing the January revolutions.

Photo via Facebook

The Internet has changed the way we live and communicate, for better and for worse. And it’s also introduced a bunch of new words into our lexicon. One can only assume that the parents of the lovely little Hashtag Jameson wanted to celebrate Twitter, the 140-character microblogging platform that was launched in 2006 and swiftly grew to over 500 million active users. A “hashtag” is the neologism created to describe starting a word with the hash mark (#) to aggregate similar messages. As of press time, little Hashtag doesn’t yet have her own Twitter account.

Photo via Facebook

Let’s head down to the sunny island nation of the Philippines for our next bad baby name reason. In the town of Zamboanga del Norte, a man was so fond of TV network ABS-CBN that he chose it for the name of his baby. The network, which is the most popular in the nation, produces and broadcasts a variety of programs from variety shows to comedies. The proud parents were quoted as saying “Like the network, baby ABS-CBN brings joy to our lives.” Don’t think this is an isolated incident, though—multiple babies in the good old U.S. have been named ESPN.

The power of video games to captivate—and some might say obsess—players is well known. But how into a game do you have to be to name your kid after the main character? For the Kellermeyer family, not very. When Bethesda Softworks, maker of the hit role-playing title Skyrim, offered free copies of their games for life to the first family to name their newborn “Dovahkiin” (after that game’s hero) on Nov. 11, 2011, the Kellermeyers jumped at the chance. Luckily, little Dovah has a normal middle name of “Tom” to fall back on. This wouldn’t be the first time that a video game company would try to influence a child’s name—in 2002, Acclaim offered $10,000 to the first couple to name their kid Turok, but there were no takers.

Photo via Gaming Bolt

Boxing legend George Foreman has a host of virtues, but originality isn’t one of them. All six of his male children bear the same name as their father, with just a number distinguishing one from the others. Thankfully, they have nicknames that they can use if things get too confusing. I can’t imagine how they handle it when a girl calls the house for one of them. To really put a cherry on the bad name sundae, he also named one of his daughters Georgetta. Foreman defended his decision by saying he wanted to give all of his kids something to share “in case they got separated.”

What are the odds that a baby named after a sports figure because of a bet would grow up to excel in the same sport? Pretty low, but it’s happened. Isaiah Thomas is a point guard for the Sacramento Kings who shares a name with an NBA hall of famer, and it’s not by coincidence. In 1989, his father James was a huge L.A. Lakers fan and bet a friend that the team would sweep Detroit after making mincemeat of the rest of the Western Conference. The payoff? If Detroit won, he’d name his unborn son after Pistons point guard Isiah Thomas. Right before the games, Lakers guards Magic Johnson and Byron Scott both pulled hamstrings, letting the Pistons run roughshod over the team. Thomas, a man of his word, dubbed his son Isaiah and the rest was history.

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