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I don’t mind if Elon Musk blows up Twitter or rockets. It’s his money. What I do mind is when he blows up the lives of his 11 children. Yes, 11. All the money in the world can’t divide your attention 11 ways. Judgmental? You bet. There are plenty of serial reproducers, like Elon. A few may surprise me and go on to be loving, responsible fathers.
But it’s not his lack of dedication to any one relationship that concerns me. It’s what he calls his children. Techno Mechanicus. It’s not a good sign that this child has only come to light a year after his arrival.
Elon Musk with his partner, Grimes, the mother of three of his children, X and Y and, now, Techno Mechanicus.Credit: AP
The names of these poor kids have become increasingly awful. And I mind because Musk is an influencer or what we used to call a role model.
That moment of choosing a name for your baby is one of the most important gifts you can give. It’s their book cover, their little logo, the shout across the playground. It’s the tiny whisper of endearment. Your name should be something you feel good about, something you can turn into a cute nickname, a name that would look perfectly at home signing bills into law or on the back of the next great work acquired by the National Gallery.
What you call your kid has an impact on how others see your little darling. Boys named Sue or similar? Character building in all the wrong ways.
Elon Musk with his son X Æ A-Xii (now known as X).Credit: Twitter
And sadly for Elon and his baby mamas (and sadder for the actual children), the names have spiralled out of control. What began as Nevada, Kai, Saxon, Damian and Griffin (perfectly normal, if not my vibe) has progressed through one daughter rejecting her name and her father. She’s now Vivian. And it has ended with children named X Æ A-Xii (a son now known as X) and Exa Dark Sideræl (a daughter now known as Y) and Techno Mechanicus. Even Zed would have been better than this.
Which is not to deny the autonomy and agency of singer Grimes, the mother of those three Muskies, X, Y and T M (the latter apparently called Tau for short). After all, think about her own chosen name. Her OG, Claire (meaning light or clearness) is the opposite of what she picked herself. She chose grime over light. I bet her mum is devo.
The good news is that, despite my fears about name contagion bringing a plague of Technos, German mathematician Anne Kandler from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology tells me that’s so unlikely. She’s too polite to say it’s because the name is unbearably awful. But after examining a data set of thousands of Australian names over 60 years, she tells me that most of us prefer to give our kids names we’ve heard and loved before. (OK, I made up the bit about loved.)
What she did discover is that there are many names which only ever occur once in the data set. We might think we love novelty and embrace fashion, but not when it comes to naming our children. Names, she says, have to prove they are “transmittable”. And what causes that transmissibility? Kandler says we choose names we already know. We have what she calls “an anti-novelty bias”. Pretty clear in Australia where we choose Oliver and Olivia, William and Charlotte, time and time again.
In 2017, I co-ordinated a first-year university subject with almost 1000 students, all about the age of 18. About 25 of the women were called a variation of Isabella. That year, I interviewed one of the academics, Jo Lindsay, who’d written a journal article about why we choose particular names for our kids. She said naming choice opened the window onto parental aspirations – and that middle-class parents wanted names that were different, but not too different.
I couldn’t figure out where the name Isabella had come from, how it had been transmitted. A truck load of possibilities: authors, actors, dead queens, television series. Lindsay had no idea – but it turns out she named her own 18-year-old daughter Isobel. But it also turns out that Bella was about to experience its own breaking dawn. A new resurgence, fed by Stephenie Meyer’s vampire stalker-porn Twilight series, saw Bellas drain all the blood from competitors in the US.
What you call your kids starts to affect them the minute you make the choice and spread the news. It’s how you want to see your child’s life play out. Techno Mechanicus is definitely not a life I want for my kids (or indeed my grandkids, the choosing of whose names I was forbidden any input.)
It’s true we all have our ambitions for our kids. We named our own kids after saints and angels. That didn’t work out, and who wants saints and angels, anyhow? And we tried desperately to avoid the most popular names of 1980s and 90s babies: the Sarahs and Catherines, Sams and Dans.
And Anne Kandler, the German mathematician, and her French partner called their daughter Mia – a simple name pronounced the same way in three languages. I guess Techno might have that going for it.
Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.
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