ANY OTHER NAME WOULD SMELL AS SWEET

In a typically busy week for the celebrity class, Lord Attenborough (Richard to movie credit compilers, Dickie to the press) excelled himself as a guest of honour at the unveiling of the Nelson Mandela statue in Parliament Square, at the memorial service marking ten years since the death of the Princess of Wales and, I shouldn’t wonder, at the switching on of the Blackpool illuminations by the actor currently cast as Doctor Who. In another part of the forest, I was rather surprised by her family’s revelation of the crack cocaine habit suffered by Mrs Mary Whitehouse. I don’t think I shall risk booking for her next tour.

But much the most compelling story for those seeking to find names to drop was that carried by the BBC news website of the New Zealand baby whose parents wished to name him 4Real. This grave decision, they solemnly explained, was reached because it was only upon first seeing an ultrasound image of the foetus that they “realised” that he was “for real”. Biology has clearly been neglected in the school curriculums of the former colonies. I blame the Victorians. What the parents – themselves rejoicing in the names of Pat and Sheena Wheaton – do not seem to have considered is the alternative of an American expression that perfectly describes their grasp of parental duty: “for shit”.

Their noble quest has been sadly thwarted by an unimaginative bunch referred to rather loosely by the BBC website as “the authorities in New Zealand”, later revealed to be personified in the figure of the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. This hapless official goes unnamed – perhaps he is called Getalife Tosser – but he rejected their choice of name on the surprisingly narrow ground that it is not permitted to begin a name with a numeral. The Wheatons argued that if someone can be called, for instance, John Williams III, then 4Real ought to be equally acceptable. Sophistry and casuistry clearly go as unrecognised as biology in the Antipodes.

Crushed by the cruel weight of New Zealand regulation, the Wheatons have put up an alternative name for the innocent object of this titanic tug-of-war, one yet more splendid than the first. For 4Real Wheaton, now read Superman Wheaton. The BBC website adds (and my reader will be so relieved at the news) that the Wheatons “have said they will refer to him as 4Real”.

I think the inevitable shortening that kids do to first names produces a happier result in the first instance – Forey has a certain mellifluous quality – than it would with the rather watery Supe. The BBC website implies that the Wheatons, seeking to throw off the chaff, may not be out of the woods, if I may mix the metaphor. “The law also advises parents to avoid names that could cause their child to be teased or made fun of” it says, surely not quoting the relevant statute verbatim. I think it unlikely that any nation’s law takes it upon itself to offer (frankly somewhat patronising) advice and to offer it in such imprecise terms. If parents are not free to make their children’s lives miserable, what is the point of them?

A word of caution against any old-country smugness on this matter: the BBC states rather darkly that “the UK’s rules on baby names are among the most liberal in the world”. Hence the emergence in London of Fifi Trixibelle Geldof, Apple Martin, Brooklyn Beckham, Zowie Bowie and the rest of the celeb kids of the last few decades. In California, Frank Zappa’s children were named, successively, Moon Unit; Dweezil; Ahmet Emuukha Rodan; and Diva Thin Muffin. (My partner, who spent part of his youth in Derby, says that “thin muffin” is a solecism and such a bakery item is properly called a pikelet in the Peak District; I think Diva Pikelet Zappa has a certain ring).

The Zappas were baulked – and then temporarily – only in the naming of their second child, to whose handle the hospital where he was born raised objection. When the seven year-old child discovered that the name Dweezil, the only one he knew, was not on his birth certificate, his distress prompted his parents to fight and win a court case to have the certificate changed [Zappa info courtesy of Wikipedia].

I’m glad the Zappas prevailed. Dweezil, who turns 38 this Wednesday, has clung to his given name in adulthood, following the family trade as a rock musician. Of course, it’s easier to live with such a name in the inordinate worlds of music, movie and sport superstardom than it is down the pub or in an ordinary neighbourhood school. Superman Wheaton, though still known to his doting, drooling parents as 4Real, will be constantly pilloried in the humdrum world and will probably rename himself Zak or Kody or whatever the fashionable boys’ name is in five or six years’ time. When they voyage out into the world, it is almost a universal desire among children to conform or at least to find an accommodation with the prevailing conventions. Being conspicuous because of your name – particularly one that proves difficult to live up to – soon becomes a cross to bear. You could argue that this is good and character-building. It probably depends on each individual’s case.

Meanwhile, if parents want to hand their kids a stick with which to beat them in later life, so be it. After all, 36 children, both boys and girls, have been registered in Britain under the name of Arsenal. There are two British boys who were indeed christened Superman. Idiocy has its place. So does whimsy and I hope it is in a whimsical spirit that the Wheatons alighted on their boy’s name. As King Lear didn’t quite cry, let leprechaunication thrive!