Saturday, January 7, 2012

New Zealand: Rejected Children's Names

New Zealand law bans names which could cause offence to a ‘reasonable’ person.

A list provided by the Internal Affairs Department shows 350 parents had the names they chose for their offspring rejected in the 10 years ending June 30, 2011.

The list of disallowed names follows the release of the most popular names for 2011 – Liam and Ruby – this week. The most popular rejected name was Justice – 49 people tried to name their child that, along with alternate spellings Justus and Juztice.

Royal titles featured heavily – King, Prince, Princess, Knight, Queen, Queen V, Queen Victoria, Lord, Lady, Baron and Duke were all rejected as were Royal, Royale, Majesty and Majesti. Religious references Messiah, Christ, Bishop, Saint and Lucifer didn’t make the cut either.

Mafia No Fear, Anal, V8, single letters, the Roman numerals I, II, III, punctuation symbols * . and / and titles such as President, Emperor, Chief, Constable, Sargent and General were also rejected.

a list of the names
Names should be about the child, not the parents, he said. "You want to name your child in a way that represents who they are, not who you want them to be."

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