It was shortly after 9 p.m. when the first child of the new year was born in the hospital in Copiapó, in the far north of Chile: a little boy, 50 centimeters tall, 3064 grams, so far, so unspectacular, if it weren’t for them two first names that the parents had chosen for their son: Griezmann and Mbappé. Like the surnames of the players in the French national team? Exactly.
The local hospital didn’t seem to care. In any case, the clinic happily spread the news of the birth of little Griezmann Mbappé on Twitter. There it rained mockery and scorn, plus pity, incomprehension and open rejection.
Of course, the criticism is not entirely unjustified: What if little Griezmann Mbappé is a nudist on the football field? At the same time, you have to say that his name is extravagant, but not unusual in local comparison, after all, parents in Chile and all of Latin America have been looking for more and more unusual names for their children for decades.
Not only French soccer players are named after: In São Paulo, for example, a certain Franz Beckenbauer Ribeiro de Lima e Silva lives. Parents who are less enthusiastic about sports prefer to be inspired by actors, celebrities and presidents, despots and even dictators. Today it is quite possible to meet a certain Marlon Brando in a remote Andental or to meet a Leididy in the expanse of the Chaco, named after Diana Spencer, the Princess of Wales, of course. Ecuador’s ex-president Lenín Moreno is so named because of the communist leader, and after a public prosecutor in Brazil had distributed Nazi propaganda online, it emerged that her father bears the rather unambiguous name Hitler Mussoline Domingues Pacheco.
Worldview does not always have to be the reason for choosing a name. Often fathers or mothers simply find the sound of a name beautiful or read a word they like somewhere: Xerox, like the copiers, or Usnavy, like it is on the ships of the US Navy.
When choosing a name, parents naturally want to set themselves apart from their surroundings, the phenomenon also exists in Germany. In Latin America, however, there are in fact no limits to creativity. Even free inventions are sometimes allowed, which has led to a real trend of Y-fantasy names in Cuba from the 1970s onwards: Yaniel, Yulieski, Yohandra and also Yoani, like the famous Cuban journalist Yoani Sánchez, whose blog is critical of the regime The reason is called “Generación Y”.
In the case of little Griezmann Mbappé, the motive for choosing a name is clear: the parents’ enthusiasm for football. The father explained in an interview that he was allowed to choose the first name, the second was the mother’s decision. The fact that both of them decided on French players is easy to explain: the names of other football cracks are already taken in the family. One of the newborn’s cousins is called Neymar Ronaldo and another is Leonel Messi.
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