"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me".

We have all heard that little axiom and while that may be true for casual name-calling, the name you are given at birth is not quite as easy to overcome. A lot of the time, cultural traditions are to blame for strange birth names, however trendy names that date rapidly and rash choices which aren't considered in their full context are also fraught with danger and are damaging to the unfortunate soul burdened with them for life.

For starters, and I swear this is true, there is the Bastard family of Sydney. There were six Bastards in the Sydney White Pages (residential telephone directory) when I lived there in the 1970s and 1980s. I understand that it was an anglicised version of some Rumanian name. Our lazy immigration officials a generation earlier had so much trouble with the names from the waves of European migrants arriving in the aftermath of the second World War that they often just came up with something similar that they could spell. My own father, Hungarian by birth, had his name changed from Lajos to Louis. They also thought it sufficiently strange that he didn't have a middle name that they gave him his real name as one. So, Louis Lajos he became. Any inflections disappeared and my mother's name changed from Weiss to White, its English equivalent.

I'll return to that later, but we'll go back to the poor Bastards. As I said, that was always going to be a tough name to live with and I would imagine that any kids would grow up with either a very thick skin or adept in the fighting department. I have no idea if they were, but I do know that one family decided to call two of their sons, Paul and Richard. All very admirable giving the children of Romanian migrants simple English names. Sadly, they didn't think to see how that fitted with their surname. Paul sounds like 'poor' and Richard is just a long version of 'rich', so these kids would forever be burdened by the name of Poor and Rich Bastard. Not good.

In the 1980s, I scored a job in a bank and after doing a year's penance in data entry, I was let loose on the customer service counter. Part of my duties involved opening new accounts and there were some real shockers. One of my first new accounts was for a fellow by the name of Charlie Siemens. Nothing too strange there, even though the surname was pronounced as you would expect - Seemens. The strange part was his middle name - Rushforth. It was apparently

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