If you married an entomologist and get upset about that, it’s kinda on you.
Are entomologists known for withholding information from their SO?
Bug related information? Yes
He probably should have been honest and upfront about it, but he also named their kid after something he obviously loves, and I think that’s great. If she loved the name before knowing its origin, she should love it even more for being associated with something that at least one parent thinks is beautiful.
The issue there is that she loved Moana. He thought she would get bullied for that name, so instead named her after a bug. He put his love for insects over his wife’s love, and tried to rationalize it to himself. But his rationalization doesn’t hold under the least bit of scrutiny, because more kids would tease her after being named after an insect than a Disney movie. The saving grace here is that the cicada doesn’t come up in Urban Dictionary (kids love that shit), and it comes up after the Brazilian municipality.
Overall, I’d say he is the butt head, but it’s not a huge deal.
Who is going to recognize that name as being after a bug though? Only people who they tell, lol
literally nothing wrong with that it’s just a name
I mean it’s a beautiful name, who really cares if it’s named after a genus of Cicadas? There are worse sounding “normal” names out there. Plus it’s named after OP’s passion, I think that shows a lot of love
What’s wrong with Cicadas anyway?
The noise. The eyes.
The insatiable love of hand meat…
They’re noisy, very noisy
In Maori, Maua means “we”, or “both of us”. It’s also shorthand for “we share similar beliefs”.
Could have gone that route.
Maua. Maua is what bwings us togeva today.
Man and Wife! Say man and wife!
TBH I don’t know how the relationship got this far if she hates bugs so much.
More precisely, how has the relationship come this far without him knowing she hates all bugs?
I don’t think it’s on him for not knowing that when she agreed to marry an Entomologist. It’s nobody’s job to read their partner’s mind, they need to communicate likes and dislikes during the courting phase and I’m sure there were plenty of opportunities to bring that topic up.
I’m not blaming him at all. Him being an Entomologist makes this all worse. She didn’t even question where the name came from.
That’s where your reading comprehension took you huh
I wonder if they are aware that in Europe the Disney character is called Vaiana, because there is a porn star named Moana.
I got downvoted to hell for stating the same thing on reddit a couple of years ago!
Also, the choice was not just to avoid association with the porn star. The name Moana was not legally available to Disney in several European countries so they had to find a different name
i love the idea that disney would for some reason care about a porn star that barely anyone has ever heard about, as if search results for the name wouldn’t instantly be overwhelmed by the disney movie…
the legal issues have to like 97% of the reason for the name change
Thank you kind sir for the vintage research material.
Apparently there were legitimate trademark issues also at play. Apparently its an Ice cream brand in Romania and a perfume brand in Spain.
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Idk it’s not the worst name ever. Definitely sounds like a “kooky millennial parents wanted an interesting name” name. But there’s worse. Much worse. He should’ve told her where it came from though, kinda a dumb thing to not involve your wife in. You know. The name of her child.
Mahua is a perfectly cromulent Bengali name.
Is the kid Bengali?
By the law of names, the kid is now a cicada.
MY GENUS IS NOT YOUR NAME
Stop genus appropriation now!
UrGenus is a gas giant.
I mean I have said I would want to name my kid Nodo-Chinko. It’s the Japanese word for the Uvula but it more directly translates to “throat penis”…
So he could have done way worse.
throat penis
I now have a new term for the uvula, thanks Japan!
I’ve always been partial to the name Pubert myself. It’s pronounced “Pube-air.”
I mean チンコ (chinko) is still censored on at least TV, so I think it’s a little disingenuous to say it’s the word. The actual word is 口蓋垂 ( こうがいすい - kougaisui) whose kanji mean something like mouth, cover, and zig-zaggy thing (specifically a type of Shinto zig-zag paper design, according to my dictionary).
Nodo hwhat?
Oh it means “throat penis”? I don’t know if that’s better.
People make such a big deal of naming their kids. Just give them regular old names and call it a day. How about Paul? I guarantee everyone will feel indifferent to it, so it’s a winner.
I wonder how Maua would feel if they named her Paul instead.
Atreides
Pesky Paul and the bene geserits doing weird shit in the dessert.
Ya know, I never really processed it before, but that’s Frank Herbert making a Greek mythology pun/spoiler: the atreides
call it a day
If they were afraid that the name Moana might be bullied at school, then Day would maybe be even worse
I know a few Days, they were never made fun of for their name. Some puns sometimes, but I feel like Moana could be more prone to it.
Sorry… this was a joke, based on OP saying “call it a day” in a post about name giving
No I know lol, I just wanted to answer earnestly :)
Never met a Paul I liked. Clearly your statement is false.
:)
Paul Rudd? Though, maybe that’s just cause you’ve never met him.
Paul Rudd is so charismatic you feel like you’ve met him even if he’s only on your TV screen.
So many good names to reuse. I say we pull out some victorian names, we’ve gotten past the “that’s my grandma” part of the cycle so it’s about due pretty soon.
Not dave cuz fuckdave
deep cut right here
Paul is a weird name for a girl. I’d rather go with McKenzie or Murphy or Noah. Now those are some girly names.
Wife should have Googled it, she’s the buttface.
The Cicada species doesn’t pop up in the first 3 pages though
All the less reason to be upset about naming your kid after a bug. If the bug isn’t even Google’s first association, why should it be yours?
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She didn’t one day googe it for some reason, she read through his papers and found it for some reason.
What’s wrong with bugs? They’re cool, while a made up string of characters (that sounds good) might be better I don’t see what’s wrong with using an uncommon scientific name. Then again being honest is likely helpful.
There’s nothing wrong with bugs. It’s all about intent, and he clearly intended to hide this from her because he knew (correctly) it would be a problem for her. So it was a lie by withholding relevant information. About their daughters name. Its messed up. It’s also dumb because it’s so easy to look up the origin of a name that this “secret” isn’t really one at all.
It would be, but he did say he thought it was a harmless secret. That could be read as though he didn’t know it would bother her.
Like, my name allegedly means things, but unless my mom really hates the Irish, I don’t think many of them would set her off.
I see your point, but can’t square it.
If he had said “I didn’t think it mattered so I didn’t think to tell her” that would make sense, but the fact that he said he deliberately hid it (ie harmless secret) means he knew she wouldn’t like it. Which makes sense because I think it would be pretty common to get “no” for an answer when you ask your spouse if you can name your kid after a bug.
Mm, yeah, that’s possible, too. I think I just considered that to be a turn a phrase.
This is almost off-topic, but I’ve always found it kind of funny that people ask questions like these in AITA when they could get an answer if they just thought about it for 5 minutes. Like, “Wow, my wife really hates this. And, it either was or was not my fault, so… hm.”
I was questioning why it became so problematic. It’s still a good name and could totally have been a coincidence. The name being related to work seems like the main issue to me.
I was questioning why it became so problematic.
I guess I left this part out: If you haven’t noticed, many people don’t like bugs.
What’s wrong with bugs?
they give programmers nightmares
What? Why would I have nightmares about the thing that secures my continued paycheck?
I fucking love 'em.i guess it depends on whether you’re working for someone else or not. I’d guess most independent programmers would rather make new things rather then just fixing what they’ve made before.
Pro level gaslighting
Because having a weird name makes you a target for bullying. Also the name of a loud and annoying beetle is worse.
In my experience having a common name has that effect too. I feel like every name has the potential for bullies to target it. Also this is only one subcategory of beetle (that most people likely don’t know) if I read it correctly.
I mean depending on their ethnic background naming the kid Moana would have been an issue for reasons besides being teased for being named after a disney princess.
If you can only name kids after your own ethnic background there’s a lot of Richards/ Riciardos/Jeans/Jans/Johns/Stephen/Joris/Mubaraks/Etiennes out there that are mislabelings.
All of those examples are linguistic drift though.
Naming a white girl moana isn’t the same as some guy named Peter and his russian buddy Pyotr realizing that their names derive from the same origin in Greek (or Aramaic depending on how much you wanna argue Kefa should count as the origin since Petros was a direct translation of it as a name)
It’s not only linguistic drift, it’s about awareness. Three used to be a beer narrow set of names (in western Europe) that got used, with a mostly Catholic base, so your John, Paul, Marie type names which would hear the variation of your country. Usually the ancestors would be reflected in the naming convention.
However awareness spreads through media like newspaper and film. Celebrity means that different spellings of names get noticed and get used, regardless of culture. There’s Estonian men named James, because of James Dean (or Bond). There’s kids named after fashion brands nowadays.
The boundary between appropriation and homage is thin. Is Willem Dafoes embracing his school nickname insensitive towards the Dutch? It can be cringey, like Shia Labeoufs mother making two spelling mistakes in her new french inspired last name. It’s a bit time deaf maybe but I wouldn’t personally classify it as inappropriate.
Ultimately culture works by drawing inspiration from others. Like Picasso being inspired by Cycladic sculpture and Renaissance artist by roman art.
All comes from PIE
Happy
PIEcake day!
Are you saying that if one ethnicity uses a name another can’t? If so, someone should inform all the Japanese people named after various white Disney characters (not that it’s a huge group, but particularly around Frozen there were some Elsas and such).
No, just that it’ll pretty offensive for the white folks that have made polynesian life hell since just after they found the Pacific to suddenly begin jacking their names and cultural aesthetics because of a fun movie.
This is the same shit as the dreadlocks debate, people are still getting discriminated against for this stuff, it ain’t kosher to wear it like a costume while the people it originates from can’t wear it without catching shit when it was theirs from the start.
Issues around “black hair” (I think is the most common word for it, but feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here) are certainly real and depressing.
I still don’t think naming a child after a name you happen to like is so problematic (well, unless the name you like is something like ‘Hitler’ or will otherwise cause trauma and issues for the child). If using another culture’s name is a bad kind of cultural appropriation, then either nearly everyone or almost no one is guilty of this (the former because people move and cultures merge and split, the latter being a reductionist take that all human genetics come from basically the same place and/or a “pre-world” language family).
I think cultural appropriation itself is a bit of a weird one. You have people like most Japanese who encourage people to wear kimono and other Japanese styles. I assume that’s true in a lot of the world (I just happen to be more familiar with the Japanese side having lived here for about a decade). But is wearing clothing cultural appropriation? Is cosplay? My Japanese friends and wife encourage me to wear yukata and such, but I generally am just my jeans-and-tshirt self.
Speaking of, were all those Japanese around the Meiji restoration wearing suits appropriating Western culture. Is “Western culture” even a unified culture? Cultures have always borrowed, stolen, and shared. I think if something is intentionally done in mockery or some other way, it’s not OK. Other than that, I think a lot of people are angry, often on behalf of others who may or may not actually be angry themselves.
This, and cultural diffusion is a normal part of human society. It has been for countless thousands of years.
I understand why cultural appropriation can be problematic but the fact remains that the usual mode of cultural diffusion has been, “that’s really cool. I wanna have that too”
It’s not a zero sum game because there isn’t some finite limit. By wearing a kimono or whatever you aren’t taking someone else’s right to wear one away from them.
the way i see it it’s at worst cringey and in bad taste, but on the flip side it’s at best a huge compliment because someone liked your culture enough to name their child according to it.
And a cringey name is nothing new, there are people who name their kids “hope” or “gaius maximus”
Would some Polynesian person naming their kid Richard or some other white bread name be problematic?
