The Europeans and Africans have had a time-zone head start in replying to this thread. In the United States, as the interesting article kindly submitted here re

The Europeans and Africans have had a time-zone head start in replying to this thread. In the United States, as the interesting article kindly submitted here reports, there is complete freedom in giving names. Adults can change their names easily (which probably helps bolster the freedom of parents giving any name to their minor children) and each member of a family can have a different surname from each other member--I know many examples. The culture of the United States is, of course, decidedly more individualistic than the culture of many other countries in this and other regards, and the legal system here follows the general pattern of favoring freedom typical to Anglo-American legal systems. The most widely known popular culture expression of an extreme case of child naming for people in my generation is the late Johnny Cash's song "Boy Named Sue," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_Named_Sue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy_Named_Sue written by children's author Shel Silverstein. In jest is truth, and the song helps a lot of people here empathize with children who get stuck with odd-sounding names. Plenty of Americans who were born in other countries arrive here with names that don't fit the naming patterns of English-speaking countries, but Americans have mostly learned to deal with a great diversity of names among their friends and neighbors. (Because my wife is a first-generation immigrant from Taiwan, and we have had occasion to live in east Asia since our children were born, we thought carefully about both English and Chinese names for our own children.) The original Freakonomics book has a very interesting section on names in the United States, including the case of the Johnson family (Johnson is the second most frequent surname in the United States) who had many children, and named one Winner. Then Winner Johnson went on to become a problem child and eventually a career criminal. Meanwhile the family had another child, whom they named Loser ("my friends call me 'Lou'") who eventually grew up to be a law-abiding, responsible citizen and a police officer. It's hard to know what influence names have, but anyway in the United States people are rather used to unusual names and bugs in the first iteration of giving names are curable by name changes.