“Putting matters of taste aside, X Æ A-12 is a wildly impractical name,” Wattenberg went on. “It’s not only hard to spell and remember and virtually unpronounceable; it’s not even easily typable and no forms or databases will accept it. It’s simply nonfunctional. If—and it’s a big if—this is their real name choice, it’s in a whole different class than other celebrity baby names that people object to on the basis of style. It fails at the basic job of being a contemporary American name.”
“Fails at the basic job of being a contemporary American name” would sound, to a lot of us, like failure. I doubt it would to Musk and Grimes. Perhaps the only answer for them was going to be a name that fails at being a name, and therefore deconstructs the concept of people having names in general. In that case, mission accomplished. Though, of course, there’s someone else who did it first.
Comments are closed.