Posted on 11/30/2004 9:56:16 AM PST by COUNTrecount
And What Name Will Phinnaeus Have for Mommy? By Paul Farhi Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, November 30, 2004; Page C01 Congratulations, Julia Roberts, and you, too, Mr. Julia Roberts, on the birth of your twins, little Hazel and Phinnaeus. But our joy over your Blessed Event is tempered by a couple of questions. To wit: Hazel? And, more important, Phinnaeus? Willis sisters Scout LaRue and Tallulah Belle share a fairly sedate last name. Rumer also has it. (Kevin Mazur -- Wireimage) We know we don't live in a "John" and "Mary" (or "Paul") era anymore, that the traditional honor-thy-ancestors naming consensus of previous generations has collapsed under the weight of all those Caitlins and Connors and Briannas. But Phinnaeus and Hazel? Hazel is retro by at least a couple of generations. The world stopped having Hazels around the time it stopped having Berthas and Gladyses and Mildreds. The last time Hazel was heard from was 1961, when Shirley Booth played a busybody maid of that name in a sitcom of that name. Phinnaeus is even more retro, as in Old Testament retro, and more obscure than such OT running mates as Methuselah and Obadiah. But that's probably the point. Celebrity baby names these days are very . . . different. We say this not to pass judgment, but to point out one more way celebrities are not like the rest of us. The list keeps growing. Demi Moore and Bruce Willis are the parents of Rumer Glenn, Scout LaRue and Tallulah Belle. Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay singer Chris Martin recently begat Apple. Sylvester Stallone sired Sage Moonblood and Sistine Rose. Courteney Cox Arquette and David Arquette are the proud parents of Coco.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That skinny woman?
Libs typically give their kids outrageous names.
It's just another cry for attention.
The names they give their children are like names someone would give to their pet dog or cat.
Coco the monkey?
petty women?
Idiot celebrities. (I know...I know...redundant.)
When we named our children, we followed my guideline known as the Mallet Factor. This is factored by assessing the age of the child when you awake in the middle of the night to see the mallet coming toward your face.Our children are Jon, Will, and Joe (low mallet factors, low risk). One (bachelor) friend wanted us to use the nanme Burton Ernie (very high risk on the Mallet Factor Scale).
Hazel is somewhat high risk, Phinnaeus is much much higher risk, and Dweezil is Mallet Condition Red.
It's PR for her movies, two of them. Clooney announced a slipped disk yesterday and the movie. In the same press release. It's supposed to be an entertaining movie, but this making the personal lives of the actors part of the movie release hype is getting old.
Uncle Eric? Sorry Mom, you look so much alike.
The last funky names I could actually respect were "Moon Unit" and "Dweezil." At least Zappa put some thought into 'em. ;o)
There was a lib physician in my lab
in the early 90s who named her son
Zeno Stryder and her daughter Amniota.
MV
She's an IDIOT and I refuse to watch a movie (let alone pay for it) she's in EVER again!
http://www.detnews.com/2004/metro/0411/30/B01-19430.htm
A name is a name is a name? For Julia Roberts, it's double trouble
By Laura Berman / The Detroit News
Until the birth of Julia Roberts' son in a Los Angeles hospital two days
ago, the only "Phinnaeus" of note was Phinnaeus Gage, a 19th century railway
worker who distinguished himself in medical history by accidentally blasting
a metal rod through his left cheek and the top of his head.
That Phinnaeus sat up moments later and was soon walking again. But within a
few weeks, the once mild-mannered railway foreman was transformed, as one
medical text describes it, "into a cursing belligerent tyrant" and a great
example of what brain trauma can do.
Perhaps Julia Roberts is naming her son after Phinneus, the blind soothsayer
of Greek mythology, an ineffectual fellow tormented by harpies and rescued
by Jason and the Argonauts.
If she named him Marlon, we'd get it. What is clear is that we're not
supposed to get it.
An editor at People magazine was making the talk show rounds on Monday,
noting that Roberts chose middle names with obvious meanings: Walter, after
her father; Patricia, after her mother. He offered no explanation, though,
of Phinnaeus and Hazel.
Roberts has twins, and as if Phinnaeus weren't tough enough, she's named her
daughter Hazel Patricia Moder.
Hazel is a name rarely taken since the 1940s, but is the name of countless
grandmothers and great-grandmothers, a name almost as out-of-fashion as
Phinnaeus.
It's a name that is downright hostile to even the idea of glamor. Ever since
Shirley Booth created an early-TV character in a show of the same name,
"Hazel" has been emblematic of the frumpy, middle-aged housekeeper -- a
paragon of the unsexy woman.
But if you think about the names Roberts has so deliberately chosen, you can
see they express perfectly what it means to be a movie star -- which is a
way of saying not one of the rest of us.
The gossipy Hollywood Web site Defamed.com cheerfully derided the twins'
names as "inevitably semi-retarded" but less so than Apple, the truly
ridiculous name chosen by Gwyneth Paltrow for her new baby girl. But I
disagree: these names -- archaic, unfashionable -- aren't artlessly chosen
at all. They succinctly prove their mother's power.
They at once belie her insistence on anonymity and privacy: If anonymity
were to be truly longed for, giving your children straightforward,
unremarkable names might help: Steve and Susan, say.
Why, instead, with a universe of names at your disposal, make your son an
inevitable classroom laughingstock, doomed like a mythological character to
a lifetime of helping others spell Phinnaeus -- a name almost impossible to
spell correctly?
Maybe because you're so aware of your own power as a symbol of glamor that
even the most prosaic name is instantly transformed by the act of you using
it.
Naming your kids Phinnaeus and Hazel encapsulates, at once, the arrogance
and allure of being a movie star, sublime and ridiculous at once.
Don't try it at home.
So would Phinnaeus be shortened to Phinny (or Finney) - back in the day a kid with that name would get the crap beat out of him daily by a kid name Butch! The way the press carried on with her pregnancy you'd have thought she was the first woman to have a baby! I didn't hear anything about the dad during this-oh well he's served his purpose -I'm sure he'll be out the door soon!
And this one I must say I am not making up. Yes, it was a joke on a sitcom, but it actually happened to a girl in my sister-in-law's class. She was Hispanic (Mexican, I think), and she had a name that rhymed with Tamale, namely "Female".
The mother hadn't decided on a name by the time the birth certificate had to be entered, and "the nurse was kind enough to give [her] such a beautiful name".
The poor girl only learned of the origin of her name in 3rd grade when she asked about it.
TS
Actually, Dweezil was bummed when he first learned that his birth name was not Dweezil. (Long story.) He immediately sought to have his name legally changed to fit what his parents had called him since he was born.
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