The strangest choices for baby names

Choosing a name for your child is an incredibly tough task. It is one of the single most important decisions of your life and probably the most important decision that you will make for another human being. Once you choose a name your child is stuck with it (unless they legally change it but not many people actually do that). The name you choose could signal strength, it could signal charm, it could signal friendly, it could be the same name as a serial killer when they are 15 years old and they could be stuck with a horrible nickname forever. There is a lot to consider when you pick a name and then there are the unknown factors that the future will bring too. We have found two of the strangest examples of names online and felt they had to be shared.

The first is one you may have heard about. Elon Musk the eccentric genius behind Tesla Motors, Space X, Paypal, and many more oddities has recently had a child with Grimes the pop star who has the hit song Oblivion with 60 million views on YouTube. The pair are an odd couple and although their occasional appearances in the limelight have sparked some curious reactions, they were largely left out of the limelight. Yet when they announced the name of their child the world gave a collective confused shrug. They decided to name their boy X Æ A-12. I have encountered some names before that were tough to pronounce but this surely takes the biscuit.

X Æ A-12 is pronounced “EX-ASH-A-TWELVE” and is a little bit of a mouthful. The X is meant to signify the unknown variable in any equation, Æ is the elven spelling of AI, which means love or artificial intelligence, the A-12 part refers to the couple’s favorite aircraft (the precursor to the SR-17. The A-12 is remarkable because it has no weapons but is incredibly fast. The A in that jetplane also stands for Archangel which is Grimes’s favorite song. Now that we have explained it, it makes perfect sense as a name, right? Right…

Recently on Reddit, a user shared her woes about the future name of her child. When she was at the picking partners convention (no there is not an actual convention) she chose a special one. She says that he and his parents are math geniuses and so he requested that the name have something mathematical about it. She reluctantly agreed and told him to think about some options. When he came back with his idea she was not enthusiastic. He wants to name the boy… Cube. Cube! Cube? While she and every other person in the world expected the boy to have some cool obscure mathematical reference, in the end, he just wanted to name it after the Rubik’s cube a children’s toy.

The world of Reddit reacted very badly to the idea with most wondering how someone who claims (ok his wife claims) to be a genius choosing the silliest option available. Elon Musk is probably an actual math genius though and he did only choose X so perhaps the average person is just too simple to understand their amazing choices? I’m not sure but there are so many mathematical equations named after smart Greeks that you would imagine one of them would be a way cooler name. I’m not suggesting Pythagoras as a name but what about Euler and his Polyhedral Formula.

Clearly, there are some incredibly obscure mathematical references that could be called upon but instead, Elon chose X and a random Reddit user chose cube. I am actually all for the idea of a unique and obscure name, but I think they didn’t need to be so lazy about it.