The rebellion against clever baby names

Dear DJ:

Riddle me this, why must millennials or hipsters name their newborns Lorax, Fennel, Maverick, Jaxson, Skylar, etc? What happened to good ol’ Bob and Henry? You know, names of power.

— Javier Zoquaipa De La Rosa III

I like to think that Bob and Henry have retreated for the time being to a mountain refuge where the Coalition of Names of Power keeps its secret headquarters. There, under the auspices of their leader, Steve, bearer of the most powerful name in the history of names, Bob and Henry join the rebellion against clever baby names. When the rebels learn of the hipster empire’s plan to create a viral video that will convince every expectant mother on the planet to name her son something like Admiral or Kumquat, Bob and Henry join a suicide mission to steal the video’s code and give the rebellion some kind of new hope.

Call me terminally hipster, but I’ve never understood the backlash against giving kids “weird” names. While I understand that it’s a little unorthodox, the fact that people get so jazzed to hate on somebody’s name just boggles my mind. On the one hand, you’ve got some hipster who named her daughter Endive; and on the other there’s an ocean of dead kittens, Harambe the gorilla, Donald Trump’s Twitter account, and a guy in a “Good Riddance, David Bowie!” T-shirt.

Guess which topic will more likely get random strangers ranting.

Interestingly, the weird-millennial-hipster-baby-names topic has been studied, at length, by no less than Goldman Sachs (!), which concluded (as one facet of their sweeping assessment of millennial culture) that millennials are a bunch of low-grade consumption junkies hellbent on proving exclusivity through allegiance to “unique brands.”

Sure. Maybe I’m being supernegative about the callow classification of an entire generation by the investment bank that helped launch a global financial crisis that put that same generation out of work and into debt for life. Maybe I’m a little biased there. Probably shouldn’t get into it too too much.

In the end, my (ironically?) elaborately named friend, there’s nothing inherently weird about anybody’s name, hipster or otherwise. Just try saying the word Bob over and over again for about five minutes. Bob. B-o-b. BOB. Bo . . . b. Bobobobobobobobob.

What kind of crazy person names a kid Bob?!