Move over Apple Paltrow, Blue Knowles, and North West, there’s a new weirdest baby name in town and it’s galaxies above the rest. Part registration plate, part wifi password, part violation of California’s birth name register laws, Grimes and Elon Musks’s newly born baby ‘X Æ A-12’ is no doubt going to be the recipient of a few baffled school roll calls in years to come.
Unfortunately, early rumours that the name was possibly pronounced ‘Josh’ or ‘Azalea’ turned out to be unfounded, after a rather underwhelming interview in which a clearly sleep deprived Elon revealed the name is pronounced pretty much how it’s spelled, though if that just leaves you more confused, don’t worry because Musk and Grimes are reportedly still hashing it out over whether Æ is pronounced ‘ae’ or ‘ash’. Thank god they didn’t call it Gif.
Young X Æ will no doubt go down in the annals of ‘people whose names are a nightmare for database designers world over‘ alongside the infamous Mr Null – a man who Wired reported in 2018 lived a life of constant misery as his name ‘Null’ was recognised as a blank entry by many poorly coded computer systems. It’s also a conundrum lampooned by comic XKCD with the parent who named their child ‘drop table;’ (a term that would in theory wreak havoc on many lazily written school computer systems) and which may have inspired the urban legend of the man who replaced his car number plate with the same phrase in order to destroy any speed cameras he drove past, along with their log of prior offenders.
In any case, we have to give credit where credit is due, and for a man like Elon who has turned PR bungles into an art form, this is the creme de la creme. In a year where most of the world is locked in their homes due to a plague, Musk and Grimes taking one for the team to help distract us all from headlines about financial collapse and Presidents trying to inject us all with bleach is probably the least terrible thing a celebrity has done, and as long as they’re not out there releasing terrible lip-sinchs or singing into a hairbrush about eating fish, we’re all here for it.
