What not to name your kid

Siri Hafso is tired of the jokes. “Hey Siri. Like the iPhone?”

Yes, she does, but the jokes are annoying and time-consuming. She thinks Apple CEO Tim Cook should give her a MacBook in payment for time served.

That might be a bad precedent for Cook.

While Siri isn’t a common name, it is not unknown. According to My Name Stats, there are about 2,000 people in the United States named Siri.

The name may be more popular worldwide and is used in Norway, Sweden, and the Faroe Islands. In fact, Apple’s virtual assistant was named by its co-creator, Dag Kittalaus. He had a co-worker in Norway named Siri, which means ‘beautiful woman who leads you to victory’ in Norwegian. He liked the name, and he planned to give it to his daughter when she was born. But it turned out he had a son. So the name was shelved until in 2007 when he launched his new speech recognition technology. He named it Siri.

As it happened, Apple CEO and founder Steve Jobs wanted to buy the technology, and he wasn’t fond of the name Siri but decided to keep it in the end.

People with the name Alexa presumably have the same problem as people named Siri. There are about 10,000 people in the U.S. with the name Alexa, the call name of Amazon’s digital assistant. In the UK, there are more than 4,000 people named Alexa under the age of 25 and some of their parents say the jokes are relentless and verge on bullying.

People have just stopped naming their kid Alexa. When the Amazon device was introduced in the UK in 2016, it was the 167th most popular baby name. By 2019, it was 920th, according to the BBC.