Front cover detail of "Bad Baby Names" by Michael Sherrod, Matthew Rayback, and Joey Gates (Illustrator)
By host Tom Ashbrook
It's not easy being Blessed Boykin, Sweet Pitts or Just Desire. But if that's what your parents named you, that's what you live with.
And the archives of American names recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau are full of doozeys. Good Knight. Sweet Prince. Zombie Davenport. Hysteria Johnson. Not to mention, of course, the timeless Ima Muskrat, or Mary Christmas, or Ima Nut.
Who would do that to a child? Did they really do it? And are we doing it today? A new book tells all.
This hour, On Point: Bad baby names, and the people who bear them.
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Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback, co-authors of "Bad Baby Names: The Worst True Names Parents Saddled Their Kids With -- And You Can Too!"
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Laura Wattenberg, author of "The Baby Name Wizard" and creator of the online Name Voyager, a website that tracks the popularity of individual names over time.
