NAME GAME

People With Unfortunate Names

These poor, poor bastards

Chris Zappa
3 min readJan 12, 2022

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Photo by Oko_SwanOmurphy via Getty Images

What’s in a name?

Well, for some people, everything. Whether they consider themselves fortunate recipients or not, many become renowned for their name alone.

Today in The Washington Post, Jennifer Hassan published a story titled, “Meet the Kovids. These people share the same name as the Covid-19 pandemic.

I would say that is a dreadfully unfortunate coincidence.

It led me to think about how the name Karen has been co-opted to represent “typically middle-aged white women who believe themselves to be the victim of any given situation due to an overly-inflated sense of entitlement.”

I’ve always found this to be distressing. One of my very best friends is named Karen and she is nothing like what this name has come to represent in today’s volatile cancel culture. I feel bad for her and every other Karen who now unfairly bears the burden of their name being synonymous with shitty behavior.

All of this led me to think about other people who have offbeat or outlandish names. I couldn’t help but think about Bart Simpson prank calling Moe’s Tavern and asking for Seymour Butts or I.P. Freely.

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