Recently, I have been spending a lot of time in the subreddit known as r/tragedeigh. In this dark corner of the internet, people from around the world gather to discuss baby names. Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? Yet r/tragedeigh is in fact a labyrinth of online snark in which one can get lost for hours.
What is a tragedeigh, you may ask? And why is it represented by a maniacally grinning blond woman?
The subreddit defines tragedeigh as “a given name that has been deliberately misspelled or completely made up to appear more unique than it actually is.” Tragedeighs do not include ethnic names like Aoife, Dafydd, Safiya, or Keonaona, which are, respectively, Irish, Welsh, Arabic, and Hawaiian. They do include names like Jynyphyr, Braxtynn, Aynjel, and Kloweigh—which, according to the subreddit’s popular wisdom, are names mostly chosen/invented by conservative and/or fundamentalist white women. Hence the avatar who by Norwegian standards has a smile wide enough to swallow her baby whole.
The purpose of the subreddit is essentially to provide a place for people to post tragedeighs and then comment on them. The bulk of submissions come from the United States. This is hardly surprising, since in my experience Americans dominate English-language content on the internet. Yet the population of the European Union is greater than that of the US and the subreddit’s members come from all over the world—so why aren’t they reporting back about tragedeighs in France, Latvia, or, in my case, Norway?
Given the social media sniping that frequently takes place between Europeans and Americans, it’s tempting to reach for a well-worn but stereotypical argument: Europeans are simply better educated and more worldly, and they name their children accordingly. However, while education and social class certainly influence parents’ naming choices, that’s not the whole story. Data from the Social Security Administration shows that most Americans do not give their children tragedeigh names.
Nevertheless, should a parent in the United States want to name their child a tragedeigh, they can usually do so with few or no restrictions. In some states, they can even forego a name entirely. By contrast, many European countries, including Norway, have laws on the books that both require a child to be named and restrict the types of names that parents can give. For example, the use of surnames as first names is illegal in Scandinavia and Germany. Thus, while American children may be called Carter, Hunter, and Taylor their German counterparts Rademacher, Jäger, and Schneider do not exist. (Norwegian surnames tend to be patronymic or place-based, e.g. Kristiansen or Berg (mountain), rather than occupational, so there are no Norwegian equivalents.)
The strictness of these naming laws varies from country to country. Norway is actually quite flexible in that the law only forbids the use of surnames as first names as well as names likely to be a burden or disadvantage to the child. By contrast, Denmark and Iceland provide lists of approved names. In the Netherlands and Germany, registrars can reject unsuitable names. Nevertheless, loopholes and leeway exist. Adolf, Alemania, and Blücherine have been deemed acceptable in Germany. Gennathalia, Paris-London, and Sjoertailyson turned up in the Netherlands in 2014. Meanwhile, Buse Ural, a Norwegian of Turkish heritage, lamented that her mother should have known better when naming her; “she had, after all, lived in Norway for a long time before I was born.” Buse, whose name means “kiss” in Turkish and “booger” in Norwegian, is not alone; Eylül, a popular girls’ name in Turkey, means “hey, cock!” in Dutch and as of 2017, 14 women in the Netherlands had Eylül as their first name.
Orthography also limits the production of tragedeighs. Most, if not all, Western European languages are written much more phonetically than English. There are limited letter combinations that represent valid sounds, and a name’s spelling cannot be changed without also changing its pronunciation. For example, Alexander, Aleksander, and Alexsander all sound the same in Norwegian and all three variations are used in Norway. If, though, we decide to go the tragedeigh route and and replace E with Y, we get Alyxandyr. Y and E are pronounced differently in Norwegian, and Alyxandyr not only sounds bad it is also very hard to say.
However, orthography, like the naming laws, cannot stop all tragedeighs. It is entirely possible to transform the Norwegian names Freya, Eyvor, and Øystein into Freeyah, Ajvår, and Øjsteijn — the tragedeighs all pronounced like the originals. At this point in Norway, however, Janteloven steps in.
Janteloven—the Law of Jante—is not a formal law but a mentality. The phrase was coined by author Aksel Sandemose in 1933 to characterise society’s aversion to tall poppies. Although Sandemose was Danish, Janteloven is a well-known phenomenon in all three Scandinavian countries. According to anthropologist Kusum Gopal, who did field work in Denmark, “some of my informants were amused by it, and most others either irritated or agitated by it, [but] none feigned indifference. They were not particularly interested in Moseloven (the Ten Commandments) but all knew of the levelling spirit of Janteloven: ‘Don’t think you are worth something special; don’t think that anyone is concerned about you; don’t think you are something more important than us’ and so forth.” Gopal’s observations also hold true for Norwegians.
A tragedeigh flies in the face of Janteloven. It not only draws negative attention to the child, but to the parents as well. Still, if you were expecting a cataclysmic outcome along the lines of the family being run out of the village and forced to fend for themselves during the polar night, you will be disappointed. Norwegians are generally quite non-confrontational and I think the most likely outcome of a tragedeigh is the child being pitied while the parents get side-eyed and become the topic of local gossip.
Things are changing, of course. The pervasiveness of American news and entertainment media exports American conspiracy theories, political discourse, and social mores to the extent that schoolchildren in Norway speak English with their friends and exist online in an entirely English-language world. Will Norwegian names die quiet, unmourned deaths against the onslaught of TikTok and Instagram baby name consultants? After all, statisticians have for years noticed a general trend away from traditional names, with parents particularly avoiding ones that contain the letters æ, ø, and å. The top ten names for 2023 in Norway were just a reshuffling of the same names that have been consistently popular for the past decade:
As one Norwegian mother commented, “People travel so much more than previously, so it is certainly a good idea to have a more international name.” Just as English tragedeighs like Taelyhr (Taylor) or Ruideirr (Ryder) are nearly impossible to say in Norwegian, so Norwegian tragedeighs are also more difficult to pronounce in other languages. Solveig and Magnhild, which are reasonably pronounceable at first glance to non-Norwegians, could be twisted beyond recognition into the tragedeighs Soolwaijgh and Mahghnhildh. Kjersti (pronounce shair-stee) is already spelled unintuitively for English speakers, but “Kursti” or “Keersti” will be recognisable guesses; meanwhile, its tragedeigh form Skjærstih provides no clues as to pronunciation.
I have reached a point in my life where the phrase “kids these days!” crosses my lips altogether too often (and very frequently when browsing the latest entries on r/tragedeigh). Still, if after having read this article you’re still adamant about calling your kid Lae’lannie Falaricka, I have only one thing to say to you: GET OFF MY LAWN!
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