American-born celebs like Angelina Jolie and Gweneth Paltrow should cherish their bizzarre baby-naming birthright, because New Zealand has zero tolerance for this type of Western creativity. Not only would the starlet’s choices of Apple, Maddox, Moses, and Pax be frowned upon and forbidden down under, but thanks to the country’s Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriage there are strict formulae and rules according to which citizens may title their tykes. Maybe when we hunger for and demand every civil liberty under the American sun, we take for granted that down under, new mothers can’t freely denominate their newborns.
According to Australia’s Herald Sun, NZ has truly been cracking down on creative or non-conformist parents during the baby-naming process. The list of strange names for kids that are banned by New Zealand’s names registrar has grown to include Lucifer, Duke, Messiah and 89. Also banned are: Bishop, Baron, General, Judge, King, Knight and Mr., names that were all said to be too similar to titles. The letters C, D, I, and T are also forbidden as first names.
Along with the list of nixed names, punctuation is also prohibited in NZ’s code for deciding what you’ll call your kid. The agency has refused to allow names involving asterisks, commas, periods and other punctuation marks. According to Toronto Globe and Mail, New Zealand isn’t the first place to police peculiar names. In Sweden, name choices are also subject to a naming law. While Lego and Google have been approved as names for children, Superman, Metallica and Elvis, and the name Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116, pronounced Albin, were not approved.
These stifling regulations truly affirm the US as the land of opportunity…the opportunity for one to name one’s child ‘orbit, planet’, or whatever eccentric epithet they can conjure up.