It has taken, to me somewhat astonishingly, 15 years for an Icelandic girl to be allowed to officially use her given name, "Blaer". Although the government may yet appeal to the country's top court.



Apparently, in Iceland there are very strict official rules on what you can call you baby, and "Blaer" was "not feminine enough". So till now Icelandic officialdom has stubbornly officially referred to the poor lass simply as "Girl".



"Icelandic Naming Committee"?? FFS. What sort of a job is that? How much does it pay? Name your own price?



Then I noted that similar restrictions apply in places like Germany and Denmark. WTF?? In this day and age, with all the problems in the world, have these people really nothing better to do? Or are they right?

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-21280101[/url

A friend of mine named her first two kids Tia-Sian and Maia-Shae - exotic names of Spanish, Welsh, Greek and Gaelic origin but a little eccentric when you consider she's just a bog-standard whitey Brit with no exotic connections that I know of.



But she then outdid herself by appearing to choose her next daughter's profession well in advance with the glamorous title, 'Talulah-Belle".



Rejecting baby names or even having a statutory list of accepted names is nothing new, though (to a non-Icelandic) Blaer seems entirely reasonable. But then most Icelandics I've met have been a bit loopy. And the Finnish. Lunatics, the lot of 'em.



Anyway, [url=http://www.parentdish.co.uk/2012/03/20/banned-the-worlds-most-ridiculous-baby-names/Other rejections are more understandable.[/url To me it comes down to the child - if they're likely to be ridiculed, bullied, etc, the name should be rejected. To be fair a surprising proportion of parents are complete idiots, even when the welfare of their child is at stake.

Somewhere out there is a child officially named Number 16 Bus Shelter.



I'm just surprised two didn't come at once.

When pregnant, my sister was planning to name her daughter Tamara.



How to solve this?



Walk around singing: 'The sun'll come out, Tamara ...' regularly.

I think "Girl" is quite a good name, for a girl.



Obviously not for a boy, there would have to be rules.

And wasn't Tarzan's kid called "Boy" ?



And how the hell did that happen, what are the chances of two kids, a generation apart, being abandoned in the jungle and raised by apes ?

Yeah, like JerryChicken wouldn't fall fowl of any such rules.

Well, if the the Shelter bit was missing they might have.

I feel you need to be a little more accepting FA of other country's rules. I mean, if your son gets taken away from you simply because you christened him Adolf Hitler like in the US. Where will it end?



I know of a child over here called "Star of the Sea" as his first name.

A lad (well he's in his 30's now) that uses my local goes by the name of Sun. His somewhat hippy mum & dad named him Sunshine, the only other person I have ever seen carry that name was the Native American wife of Dustin Hoffman's character in Little Big Man.



Nigerians and other West Africans have a tradition of using Anglo names, although not in what we'd consider the correct order. Hence the current president, Goodluck Jonathan and there was a Nigerian lad at Hull Uni called Innocent Harry

Could you imagine, say, a Rugby League player named after an American space mission?

(Apollo '11' Perelini)



When my daughter was choosing a name for my Grandson, my suggestion of Fuifui Moimoi Clark wasn't well received.

There is a growing trend in America of children being named after brands, and a few years ago, along with names like Timberland, there was a report of a number of children being christened: ESPN