When Cutesy Goes Terribly Wrong

I'll never understand the new trend to name little girls after cities in England. You know, London, Bristol, names like that... they just don't seem very feminine to me. One of these days I'm going to run into a little girl named Liverpool or Manchester and I'm probably just going to snap.

Also, as I have previously stated, I'm not a big fan of cutesying up names.

Well, a couple of years ago I ran into a name that just left me absolutely aghast... Lunden.

My god, I can barely stand to type it.

It's the worst of both worlds.

I can only conjecture that there was some dark corner of the mother's mind that knew, deep inside, that London is not exactly the prettiest or girliest name to give a child, and that maybe it would be better if it was gussied up a bit.

And so now we've gone from bad to worse, and we have Lunden.

As far as I am concerned, this name hasn't been cutesified so much as it's been uglified. The L-U-N bit, in particular, is just offensive to me. That and the fact that if you're going to name your kid after a place, the least you can do it spell it right. Seriously.

Lunden. It sounds very heavy and oppressive, almost threatening. "Don't go outside, kids, it's looking kind of lunden out there." "Cross the street, honey, that guy walking up to us looks lunden."

Ah well. I suppose it could be worse... Lunden may be a heavy burden for this child to bear, but at least it isn't Lyvyrpewl.