A Model Named Her Baby Alaska
Anne V., I suppose one of many Annes in the third-grade supermodel class, recently had an baby with her husband, a Yahoo! executive. She announced the name of the female babe on an Instagram post of the bottom of the infant’s foot: “Welcome to the world baby Alaska! Your little feet absolutely rocked my world, I’ve never been so in love! @acahan and I couldn’t be more proud. 6/25/2015.”
Beautiful baby, we can all agree. As for its name, the Baby Name Critic has a poor opinion of those who choose to name their children after states in the United States of America, or countries on Earth, or planets in the solar system. Those are names for places, not people.
Certain state names are, of course, passable names for children: Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, Illinois (pronounced the French way). Others: no. Alaska, derived from the Aleut word for “mainland,” is a perplexing thing to name a human. Alaska is undoubtedly a state of copious natural beauty, but it is also where Grizzly Man was chomped to death by a bear, where Chris McCandless died by eating poisonous berries, and where Bristol Palin is pursuing a career as a blogger/unwed mother of three (wink). To burden a child with a name that comes laden with such connotations is nothing but a curse.
This has been Baby Name Critic.
Leah Finnegan is Gawker’s Baby Name Critic.
