News Blog

The Beijing Daily, perhaps China’s best resource for bizarre stories, reported Sunday that over 3,000 Chinese babies have been named “Olympics,” as an homage to the 2008 Beijing Games. The paper said that since 2000, when Beijing was bidding for the Games, records show that 3,491 kids have been given the Chinese name 奥运, pronounced aoyun, the Chinese word that means “Olympics.” Considering the girl who makes my coffee at Starbucks is named “Zero” and Lady Flumesday came across a “sandwich artist” at Subway named “Silence,” the name “Olympics” sounds kind of pretty. It’s not so far off from the name Olympia, the name of a certain actress who won a little something called an Academy Award for her role in the 1987 film Moonstruck (see photo). And while in this case, the name Olympia belongs to a unquestionably feminine aged beauty, it isn’t so clear whether “Olympics” is a girl’s name or a boy’s name. According to the AP, who translated the story, the vast majority of those named “Olympics” are boys. And only six of them live in Beijing, the host city. Not only this, but parents are naming their kids after the Olympic mascots, the Five Friendlies. As the AP points out, this strange trend in naming is not only a product of a creepily nationalistic pride for the Olympics, but rather the fact that everyone in China has the same name and the Chinese are looking for some new names. If you, like me, still think it’s stupid to name your child “Olympics,” consider this: would you rather have this unique name or be one of the 5,598 people walking around China with the name Yao Ming?