Name games

Hey, it looks like we've got another case of some jackasses who want to give their kid a really stupid name:

A Chinese couple tried to name their baby "@," claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said Thursday.

The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.

Now, I don't speak Chinese so I have no way of knowing if this is plausible, but the poor kid's father supposedly has an explanation for this nonsense...

"The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means 'love him'," the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.

While "@" is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to sound it out -- which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like "ai ta," or "love him," to Mandarin speakers.

So why not give him a name like "ai ta" using regular Chinese characters? Oh, that's right. It's because you're stupid douchebags who think that you're clever.