girl with 'unusual' name made fun of shock!

MagicPigDetective · December 2018

robgilmo said:

MagicPigDetective said:

I have an idea what Julian is on about. I was a 'townie' that started going to a rural mid wales high school in 1988. A lot of the kids were hard farm kids and for us 11 year olds, it was a pretty terrifying couple of years. Luckily I was not singled out for any prolonged bullying, just the usual odd incidents. We adopted the minnow approach, strength in numbers. I liked football, even though I was shit at it, the fact I played every dinner hour with the hard football kids meant I was spared from severe bullying, despite being something of an outsider. But there were others who were bullied mercilessly. Usually the weak ones, shit at football etc You had to adopt some kind of survival strategy.

But, I wouldn't say it was just the farm kids. I found on the whole the farmer sons to have a sense of fairness or decency bred into them to not let things get to far. The worst bullies were boys from broken families or poverty striken circumstances.

Anyway back to the subject, my name is Geraint. I've had periods in my life where I was ashamed of it due to negative reactions to it, but hey by now I love having a very Welsh name. Us Welsh are long used to people getting our names wrong or being ridiculed. You just explain politely how it is pronounced, shrug at their ignorance and get on with it, and not go winging to the press. It's been this way for hundreds of years!

Winging to the press? If some asshole airport official took a photo of my daughter's passport and put it on social media for people to scorn at id be fucking livid, I wouldn't be telling her to just get on with it, I would also be exposing this fucking asshole to the general public.

Being bullied at school , and a child being bullied by a fully grown adult who uses their official status to do so is hardly the same thing, so while a child bullies another child you take it to their parents in the hope that they are decent enough to deal with their childs behaviour but when an adult does it you take it everywhere you can. People abusing children really gets my goat up.

Fair enough, I was pretty drunk when I wrote that and hadn’t read the report. The employee should not have done that. Still, a few of us are saying it’s a silly name for a parent to call a child.

Hippy parents called a boy in my school Mithulus Geronimo Lato. Pretty cool name in hindsight but it’s going to attract some unwanted attention.