Things that need to be considered before creating a name...

Catie Clark

In 2007, I designed and built a website that was then banned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The website was an April Fool’s gag called kittyporn4.me. It featured an escort service whose employees were all cute cats and kittens targeting lonely business travelers looking for feline companionship while on the road. The “girls” all specialized in “Pouncy paws Feng Shui massage,” which could be either clawed or clawless. As a gag, it was purrfection.
I told some Mormon friends about the website. One looked for it and found that it was banned by the church. Curious, I inquired about the church’s policies for banning websites.
The folks who censored websites for the church based their decisions on the domain name and the internet category (e.g., education, entertainment, etc.). The church censors didn’t inspect most of the websites they banned. Because “porn” was embedded in the name of my website, kittyporn4.me was classified as a pornographic site.
The church has a simple appeal process where a website owner can write the communication division of the church, stating why the ban was incorrect and asking to be recategorized. Given that I had no affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I never bothered.
Websites names can have great otential for misunderstanding. For example, the Mole Station Native Nursery in Tenterfield, Australia uses the domain name of molestationnursery.com. The firm is a legitimate nursery business in New South Wales and has used its domain name for over 20 years.
Another suggestive domain name belongs to the newspaper in Winters, Calif., the Winters Express. The paper’s website is wintersexpress.com, which can be parsed into three words instead of two.
Personal names can also make waves and impact one’s ability to get a job. Twenty years ago, a pair of researchers sent fake job applications for positions advertised in Boston and Chicago newspapers. They found that names common to white people received more interviews than names common to Blacks — results recently confirmed by a larger 2024 study by researchers from the University of California – Berkeley and the University of Chicago.
A contrary name doesn’t always result in not getting a position. I think my favorite example of this is Robert Lawless, who I interviewed regarding bankruptcy trends a few years ago. He is currently one of the people running the Consumer Bankruptcy Project founded by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D – Mass.). Lawless is the Max L. Rowe Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law.
Of course, the names that catch the most attention are the ones that have English-language innuendoes, like Bra, Boob, Poop, and Shat. I have a friend in Sweden whose last name is Bra. Bra can be a Swedish, Corsican, Catalan, and Bengali surname, and a nickname for Bernard in Hungarian and Polish.
Boob is Hindi, with the highest number of Boobs living in Maharashtra. Indian names can be far worse than Boob, however. For example, consider the perfectly acceptable Hindi name of Hardick Ramdeep.
Poop is a Taiwanese surname and Shat is Scottish. Neither is common. More Shats now live in the U.S. and Canada than live in the U.K. Out of all the lousy last name ones can have, I think Shat may be the crappiest.
Last, we should not neglect that honorable last name from Germany and Austria, Schmuck. I knew someone with the last name of Schmuck when I lived in Vienna. Schmuck means jewelry in German and is an occupational surname for jewelers. Of course, the word means something entirely different in Yiddish.