Hacker Boy is at this very minute harassing me to put the “3” in front of the 1337, almost making this post five different flavors of meta. In China, a couple want to name their new baby @ and are not getting a positive response from officials, snip:
A Chinese couple who wanted a distinctive name for their baby boy and came up with the symbol @ have earned a rebuke from the government’s language watchdog.
The parents claimed the commonly used email symbol, pronounced in English as “at”, sounded like the Mandarin for “love him” when spoken by Chinese.
But the government’s state language commission has taken a dim view of the attempt to break the mould in a country where almost 90% of the country’s 1.3 billion people share just 129 surnames.
Article continues
The father “said the whole world uses it to write e-mails and translated into Chinese it means ‘love him'”, Li Yuming, the vice director of the commission, said today.
Many Chinese use the English word “at” in pronouncing the symbol @, and when said with a drawn out “t” it sounds like “ai ta”, or “love him” in Mandarin.
Link.
Well, he can have one name on the official papers, and then the name he wants people to call him…
Then he’d be “The baby formerly known as Aita”…