… in this morning’s New York Times that he insisted on reading them aloud across the breakfast table to UD.
1.) The managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is a notorious letch. A French satirist, Stéphane Guillon, describes a recent visit of his to Radio France:
To prepare for Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s entry into the building at Radio France, Mr. Guillon said, “exceptional measures have been taken in order not to awaken the beast,” including the banning of high heels and leather pants. The head of publicity would greet him in a burqa, and “at the sound of a siren, Stage 5 of the alert system, all female workers must be evacuated.”
2.)
… Germany takes a highly regimented approach to naming. Children’s names must be approved by local authorities, and there is a reference work, the International Handbook of Forenames, to guide them. Jürgen Udolph, a University of Leipzig professor and head of the information center there that provides certificates of approval for names that have not yet made the official list, said that “the state has a responsibility to protect people from idiotic forenames.”
May 8th, 2009 at 12:01AM
This Udolph guy actually is a professor for Slavic onomastics and has his own radio show where people call in to ask about the origin of their surnames…
well if the name you want for you child is not in the book, then you can petition the government if you can make the case that the name is actually used in some other culture. Some of this is not unique to Germany. There was the Japanese couple that wanted to name their child Akuma, or "demon", and there are sometimes problems with Chinese and Japanese names that use characters that are not on the list approved by the govt (which is more a problem of data-processing I guess)