Saturday, October 08, 2005

are you there god? it's me, cholera

For whatever reason, I woke up about an hour ago and haven't been able to get back to sleep. For whatever reason, my diversion the last few minutes has been to try to think of what would I choose to name a child if the rule was that the child had to be named after some kind of bodily affliction. My Top 10 picks:

Girls:
1. Sciatica
2. Melancholy
3. Rubella
4. Palsy
5. Cholera
Honorable mention: Chills

Boys:
1. Typhus
2. Bends
3. Lockjaw
4. Ulcer
5. Croup
Honorable mention: Dandruff

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

So you're suggesting that you must've gotten up due to some sickness? Possibly of the mind? 'Cause why else would you come up with such a list?? Or am I just too traditional?

Rubella made me think of Ruby on Rails. I wonder if we will see an upsurge of that name due to geek parents naming their kids that.

Anonymous said...

Lockjaw is a great 1950s Hollywood actor name. Lockjaw Granger in Guns of Cimmaron, coming to a theatre near you.

Anonymous said...

... and the kids' pet name for you would be Psycho.

Anonymous said...

There is an excellent Smoking Popes song about a girl named Rubella. See the lyrics here.

Anonymous said...

Chlamydia would make a pretty girl name.

jeremy said...

absolut: I hadn't heard of Ruby on Rails before. Its site has a link to the 43 Things site, about which I've wanted to write a post.

allen: I worried that maybe Lockjaw was too manly for a name I would actually want to bestow on a child.

lago: I should have known Rubella was such an objectively good name that others would have picked up on it as well.

anon 11:52am: Indeed. Chlymidia was among my finalists, but I could only have so many names that ended in a schwa. Aphasia and Pellegra were also contenders, for that matter.

Anonymous said...

acne

Rebekah Ravenscroft-Scott said...

are you seriously gonna tell us that you haven't see the movie "Wait" and that you didn't steal this idea from it?

Rebekah Ravenscroft-Scott said...

er, that should be "Waiting"

Anonymous said...

What about Herpes? It's a good name for a boy or a girl.

jeremy said...

I haven't seen "Waiting". What did I steal from it, the general idea or one of the names?

birdfarm said...

It's true that there's a conversation in "Waiting" about naming a daughter "Chlamydia" (which incidentally I think is hands-down the best girls' name, and yet curiously...it doesn't make your list...coincidence???). So there is reason to suspect you of uncited sources.

However, in your defense, I heard an urban legend about some country hick parents who wanted to name their daughter "Syphillis." The story is all about the doctor trying to convince them not to do it. Sociologists, discuss among yourselves.