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.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback, co-authors of “Bad Baby Names: The Worst True Names Parents Saddled Their Kids With — And You Can Too!”

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.

Aiden is up. Tiffany is down. Liam, Alejandro, Braedon and Jack are white hot for boys. Addison, Sawyer, Shiloh and Ava for girls. And watch out for baby Memphis.

The names we give our children say a lot about cultural hopes and dreams and history. And also, increasingly, about fads and feelings and the TV show we watched last night.

Above all, parents these days aim for a unique name — and then half the kids in preschool have it anyway. How does that happen?

This hour, On Point: The names we carry, and where the name train is headed now.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Laura Wattenberg, author of “The Baby Name Wizard” and creator of the online “Name Voyager”.

Brett Pelham, psychology professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo.