One of the many consistently controversial subjects of our time is the names that people choose for the newborn children. Sometimes these names are just plain odd, and undoubtedly some of those names will ensure that children don’t get a smooth ride through school, or have to spell it to everyone, but to the same extent, having a bit of a rough time in school (and learning to accept people’s names) is part of growing up, and you can always change your name if you get tired of spelling it.
Unfortunately some people feel that it is their need to ridicule the names chosen by parents…I’m sure we’ve all done it, seen or heard a name and thought “what???”, and that’s fine, that’s your right, I’m more concerned about the people who feel a need to publically lambast people in a lasting way over their choice of name.
Unfortunately, somebody I (up until now) had quite an amount of respect for decided to do so on the weekend. Kerces, of RiotACT fame (and occasional contributor here), decided to “name and shame [1]” the children, and turn it into a weekly feature of RiotACT…according to her post it was a collective decision of the RiotACT administrators:
In the general interests of getting tough on bogans and the causes of bogans (plus giving Kerces an excuse to buy a newspaper each weekend), we of the secret RA server room decided to start a weekly (or at least frequent) column of bogan-tastic baby names found each week in the Canberra Time classifieds.
So, they intend on trawling the births notices of the Canberra Time each Saturday for names they don’t approve of, and then berate them publically, have a bunch of people leave comments about how horrible the name is, write about how horrible and nasty the parents must be, and let all the search engines pick it up so that when somebody in the family is bored and decides to Google the name, they end up with a screen filled with messages about what a bad family it is.
If it was just first names, it might not be so bad (of course they wouldn’t have a story if it was just first names), but publishing the full names and then going on about how miserable the lives of the children will be is really taking things way too far.
I generally wouldn’t wish this on people, but I hope RiotACT get sued for this…the sooner they take down this monstorous nonsense, the better.
Samuel
Comments Disabled To "Taking things too far"
#1 Comment By John_Barnes On October 2, 2006 @ 5:01 pm
Speaking of The Riot Act, I noticed this ‘random quote’ from there –
Johnboy is a whinging bitch” – 86% of the readership…
#2 Comment By Samuel On October 2, 2006 @ 5:03 pm
That one’s always good for a laugh John
#3 Comment By Samuel On October 2, 2006 @ 5:09 pm
Looks like somebody named “apehammer” also disagrees with the strange activity RiotACT is engaging in, and one of the administrators has linked back to this article.
#4 Comment By John_Barnes On October 3, 2006 @ 1:56 pm
And whilst on the topic of so-called “Bogan” names ……. some interesting names can be found on Headstones at the BOGANTUNGAN cemetery not far from Emerald in Queensland.
The list of names at the BOGANTUNGAN cemetery can be seen here –
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