Unfortunate Names
Some Parents Deserve Prison
Dear Permission to Be Powerful Reader,
Parents possess an extraordinary amount of power.
They can create an entire human being.
Then, while exhausted and possibly medicated, they are allowed to name it.
No committee.
No quality-control department.
No requirement to demonstrate basic judgment.
Two people can look at a newborn baby and say:
“Let’s call her Marijuana Pepsi.”
And society just has to deal with that decision for the next eighty years.
That actually happened.
Marijuana Pepsi was born in 1972.
Her mother chose the name because she believed it would take her daughter around the world.
Marijuana’s sisters were named Kimberly and Robin.
So this woman clearly understood regular names.
She simply chose violence for the middle child.
Marijuana spent years being teased, questioned, whispered about, and encouraged to call herself something else.
Instead, she earned a doctorate.
Now, when people feel uncomfortable calling her Marijuana, she tells them they can call her Dr. Vandyck.
I respect that.
She took an absurd name and conquered it.
But not everyone has been so fortunate.
Consider Ima Hogg.
Ima Hogg was born in Texas in 1882.
Her father, James Stephen Hogg, later became governor of Texas.
Which means this was not the work of an illiterate drifter living beneath a bridge.
A future governor looked at his daughter and named her:
Ima Hogg.
Apparently, Ima came from a character in a poem written by his brother.
That explains Ima.
It does not explain why nobody said it next to Hogg before the christening.
Sometimes the first name is innocent.
The crime happens when nobody bothers to say the whole thing aloud.
Holly Wood.
Paige Turner.
Justin Case.
Crystal Ball.
Barb Dwyer.
Stan Still.
Sue Yu.
These names sound like the supporting cast of a sitcom canceled after one episode.
This is why every maternity ward needs one sober person with veto power.
Twins are especially vulnerable.
One bad decision becomes a matching set.
Pete and Repeat.
Kate and Duplikate.
Denise and Denephew.
Juan and Amal.
Phil and Lil.
At that point, you didn’t name two children.
You wrote a joke and forced two human beings to perform it for the rest of their lives.
Imagine growing up knowing your entire identity depends on your sibling standing nearby.
Then there were twins named Benson and Hedges.
Benson & Hedges is a cigarette brand.
Most parents want their children to become doctors.
These parents apparently wanted theirs displayed behind the counter at a gas station.
Fish and Chips — proposed for New Zealand twins, but authorities rejected them.
Corona and Covid — twins born during India’s 2020 lockdown.
Zion Mixolydian and Zillion Heir — Nick Cannon’s twins.
Moroccan and Monroe — another set of Nick Cannon’s twins.
Rumi and Sir — Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s twins.
New Zealand authorities have prevented other parents from registering children as:
Anal.
Lucifer.
V8.
4Real.
Mafia No Fear.
Queen Victoria.
And one solitary period.
Just:
.
Celebrity parents are especially dangerous.
Frank Zappa named his children Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet, and Diva Muffin.
Moon Unit sounds like a discontinued NASA department.
Actress Shannyn Sossamon and Dallas Clayton named their son Audio Science.
That sounds less like a person than a course you take after lunch at community college.
Jason Lee and Beth Riesgraf named their son Pilot Inspektor.
Pilot came from a song they liked.
Inspektor came from an apparent hostility toward conventional spelling.
Penn Jillette named his child Moxie CrimeFighter.
CrimeFighter is the middle name.
Which means Penn understood that every child deserves at least one portion of their name they can hide.
Jermaine Jackson named his son Jermajesty.
He combined Jermaine with Majesty.
That is an astonishing concentration of narcissism for three syllables.
Nicolas Cage named his son Kal-El after Superman.
Elon Musk and Grimes named one of their children X Æ A-Xii.
I’m not even sure that is a name.
It looks like the temporary password a router comes with.
Then there was Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii.
That was the legal name given to a girl in New Zealand.
By age nine, she was so embarrassed that she refused to tell her friends her real name.
She told everyone to call her K.
Eventually, a family-court judge placed her under court guardianship so her name could be changed.
The judge said her parents had made a fool of her and saddled her with a social disability.
That is how badly you have to name your child before the government intervenes.
“Parents lose custody of girl for naming her Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii.” — The Gaurdian
Number 16 Bus Shelter.
That was not where the baby was found.
That was the baby’s name.
Midnight Chardonnay.
That is not a child.
That is how the child happened.
Violence.
Imagine a teacher saying:
“Violence is never the answer.”
And one child raising his hand.
Richard Head
This one is real enough that Wikipedia specifically mentions people named Richard “Dick” Head.
One story recounts someone asking a man how he got the name.
His answer:
“Because me father was a bloody arsehole.”
Honestly, that’s hard to top.
Harry Baals, Mayor of Fort Wayne from 1935–1948
Dick Kink,Member of the Washington House of Representatives for the 42nd district, In office
1957–1971
and Tiny Kox, Member of the Senate from 2003 – 2024
Dick Swett
Former Congressman.
Dick Pound
Member of the International Olympic Committee.
Hugh Mungus
In 2016, a man named Rudy Pantoja jokingly told a city councilwoman his name was Hugh Mungus.
She replied:
“Humongous what?”
The video went viral and collected millions of views.
Dick Assman
Canadian gas station attendant Dick Assman became famous after David Letterman found his name in a phone book and declared him “the coolest name in Canada.”
Letterman:
“We’ve found the greatest name in the world.”
Poor man spent the rest of his life introducing himself and immediately becoming a punchline.
Izzy Inyet
Bride Izzy Trimborn went viral because marrying fiancé James Inyet would make her name:
Izzy Inyet
When asked if she was excited to take his name.
One commenter added:
“’Is he in yet’ is pretty dire.”
Which is one of those sentences nobody expects to read in a wedding article.
Fecalynn
Parents tried to honor grandparents Fernando, Cameron, and Lynne.
They accidentally produced:
Fecalynn
There are unfortunate names everywhere.
But I have laughed at strangers long enough.
We need to discuss mine.
My middle name is Herbert.
Fucking Herbert.
I have despised that name my entire life.
Bitch, you named me after the least popular president ever?
Who got blamed for the Great Depression?
Breadlines.
Mass unemployment.
Economic catastrophe.
This is the name you selected for a newborn baby.
Herbert.
Works in accounting.
Nobody has ever looked at a beautiful newborn baby and said:
“He looks like a Herbert.”
Nobody that loved their child, anyway…
Herbert sounds like a man who was already seventy-three years old when he was born.
It sounds like a man who wears the same brown cardigan every day.
And complains that the library got too loud.
You can shorten it to Herb, but that makes it worse.
There isn’t even a good way to spin it.
Herb.
Maybe if I were vegan.
You’re named after a section at the supermarket.
I hated seeing Herbert written on documents.
I hated saying it aloud.
I hated knowing it belonged to me.
To anybody else, it was only a name.
To me, it became a container.
Every embarrassing thing I believed about myself went into it.
Weakness went into it.
Shame went into it.
Awkwardness went into it.
Every version of myself I wanted to escape went into it.
The name did not create those feelings.
But it came to represent them.
Whenever I saw it written down, it felt like official confirmation of an identity I had never chosen.
That is the strange authority parents have.
They choose a word in an afternoon.
You spend the next eighty years answering for it.
My first name was not much better.
Anton.
Anton is not objectively terrible.
But it is awkward.
People can’t pronounce it.
They can’t spell it.
They’re always asking if I’m Russian.
I’m not Russian.
I grew up on a tropical island in the Caribbean.
Small island mentality.
Their idea of being fancy.
The Soviet Union. How quaint.
They read Doyeskoski, and now everyone wants to name their baby Vladimir.
The name communicated nothing useful.
You rarely meet an Anton.
You never see an Anton in a movie.
The most famous fictional Anton I could think of was Anton Chigurh, the psychopathic murderer from No Country for Old Men.
Wonderful.
Then there was Anton LaVey.
The Satanic Bible Guy.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Then there’s Anton Yelchin
Star Trek actor.
In 2016, he died in a freak accident.
Crushed to death by his Jeep Grand Cherokee outside his house in Studio City, Los Angeles.
Unlucky.
Ok, so let’s recap…
The King of the Great Depression.
A psychopathic murderer.
And the founder of the Church of Satan.
Strong lineup.
The name also created friction everywhere I went.
I know what name friction looks like because I watched it happen to my ex-wife for eight years.
I won’t use her name.
But she had an unfortunate name too.
Most people assumed it was a man’s name.
And I watched nearly every person she introduced herself to fuck up the pronunciation.
Every time.
For eight years.
Even while my ex-wife and I were getting divorced, the judge fucked up her name.
I couldn’t believe it.
We were in a court of law.
This was a moment that counted.
And he butchered the shit out of her name in front of everybody.
Of course the judge got it wrong.
Everybody got it wrong.
Without fail.
The gaffe was a recurring joke.
This fucking name.
The strange part is that a better name had been hiding inside it the entire time.
Tony.
Look up nicknames for Anton.
Tony is very common.
Only second after Ant - but if you call me Ant, I’ll kill you.
It is especially common in places like Germany.
And it makes perfect sense.
Andrew becomes Andy.
Thomas, Tommy
Joeseph, Joey
Elizabeth, Liz or Lizzy.
Anthony becomes Tony.
Anton also becomes Tony.
You pull the middle out of the name, add a Y, and there it is:
Tony.
It’s like going by William whole life and then suddenly deciding on switching to Bill.
Anthony is the English version.
Anton is the Russian and German version.
Antoine is French.
Antonio is Spanish and Italian.
Even Antoinettes commonly go by Tony.
The most famous example is Antoinette Perry.
An actress, director, and co-founder of the American Theatre Wing.
She went by the nickname Tony, which is how the prestigious Tony Awards got their name!
They all trace back to Antonius.
And hiding inside every one of them is Tony.
So Tony and Anton are not entirely different names.
But they became two very different identities.
Secretly, I had wanted to change my name for almost twenty years.
I just never had the guts.
Like so many things, it belonged to the life I imagined living someday.
Then someday arrived.
When I started using Tony publicly, people accepted it.
Then they started calling me Tony without thinking about it.
The change stuck.
I had a friend who tried changing her name.
It bombed.
Nobody took the new name seriously.
Eventually, she gave up.
Tony was different.
It didn’t feel imposed.
It fit so naturally that people barely questioned it.
And yes, there was another reason I liked it.
Tony Robbins.
I once heard Tony Robbins say he did not believe he would have become as big as he did if he had gone by Anthony Robbins.
He was probably right.
Anthony Robbins sounds like someone who prepares your taxes.
Tony Robbins sounds like someone who walks across fire.
Names matter.
I know that better than most because I spent fifteen years learning how words influence what people think, feel, buy, and believe.
There was another problem with Anton.
It confused people.
And as a copywriter, that bothered the hell out of me.
I spent fifteen years eliminating confusion for a living.
If a headline confused people, I rewrote it.
If an offer required too much explanation, I simplified it.
If customers couldn’t remember the name, the name was wrong.
Clarity matters.
Friction kills.
And there I was, walking around with a name nobody understood.
Anton.
Most people just Call me Anthony as a reflex.
Pronounciation was all over the map.
They did not know how to spell it.
They wondered where it came from.
They assumed I was Russian.
I’m not Russian.
I grew up on a Caribbean island.
The name said nothing useful about me.
Meanwhile, everybody understands Tony.
You hear it once.
You know how to say it.
You know how to spell it.
You remember it.
Tony Robbins.
Tony Soprano.
Tony Montana.
Tony Stark.
Tony Hawk
Tony Bennett
Tony the Tiger
The name is familiar without being invisible.
Simple without being boring.
It has personality.
It moves.
And it’s American.
I cannot believe I had a better name sitting inside my existing name for my entire life and never used it.
The alternative was obvious.
But I did not look for alternatives.
I accepted what I was given.
Even my name.
Tony was not merely more comfortable.
It was better copy.
Tony V.
Sounds way better than “Anton Volney.”
Way more memorable.
For fifteen years, I helped other people find the clearest, strongest, most memorable way to present themselves.
Changing my name was the moment I finally did the same thing for me.
That is the deeper problem with a name you hate.
It does not stay on the birth certificate.
It follows you.
It walks into classrooms.
It appears on forms.
It sits on bank accounts.
It shows up in courtrooms.
It gets printed on envelopes.
It introduces you before you arrive.
It tells the world what to call you before you get a chance to explain who you are.
And because it is your name, people act like you are supposed to have some sacred loyalty to it.
But why?
I did not choose Anton.
I did not choose Herbert.
I inherited them.
Some people inherit money.
Some inherit property.
Some inherit beautiful family names.
I inherited Herbert.
That is not an inheritance.
Now I am becoming an American citizen.
And as part of that process, I can finally make the change legal.
America is admitting me into the country and allowing me to get rid of Herbert Hoover at the same time.
That feels fair.
I get to remove the name I hated most.
I get to replace the name that never fit.
I get to walk into my citizenship process carrying one identity and leave carrying another.
The country is giving me citizenship.
But it is also giving me an editorial privilege I have wanted my entire life:
Delete.
I’m not becoming a different person.
I’m removing words that no longer belong to me.
I entered this process as Anton Herbert Volney.
I will leave it as Tony V.
My parents named the child they imagined.
I get to name the man who actually exists.
Names are not everything.
Marijuana Pepsi turned her name into a triumph.
Ima Hogg became a respected philanthropist.
Some people take the strange name and make it shine.
But that is not everybody’s obligation.
You do not have to spend your life redeeming somebody else’s bad decision.
You do not have to convert every inherited burden into a heroic origin story.
Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is not transform the thing.
Sometimes you just remove it.
Herbert had a long run.
Too long.
I’m giving it back.
Tony V.
Editor-in-Chief
Permission to Be Powerful
