It's a problem, really, because I just spent the last forty minutes reading through all fifteen annotated pages of this bad baby name site. I have better things to do with my time, you know.
I had a friend in eighth grade who changed the spelling of her name every couple of weeks. She started the year as Shannon, and ended it as Shanyn, and to her credit (?) she stayed Shanyn at least through the end of high school. (For all I know, she's still Shanyn, but I haven't heard from her in about ten years.) In between, she went through Shanon, Shannin, Shynyn, Shannan, and anything else even remotely plausible. This kind of thing happens in eighth grade, and not just to the girls, although it's pretty much only the girls who make inappropriate use of the letter Y. The boys just fiddle with nicknames and other short forms.
Reading through the awful baby names site, I was dredging my memory for bad names I've encountered in my life, and there really haven't been many of them. We had one unfortunate firstname/lastname combo in my high school (Mike Grifone) and one name with associations most of the other students didn't catch (Hana Lee), but that might have been it. Oh, wait, I forgot about Krystal Tweedle.
It's not that I don't understand the desire to name your child something out of the ordinary. I went through elementary school and high school in a class with three other Susans (and two Suzannes). I just, it's just, I mean, no. Never mind. People who would name a child McKynsy Nycolle aren't speaking the same cultural language as I am.
I wasn't sure, at first, what to do with this Village Voice article on the horrors of being a humanities PhD. No, I mean, if I'm being honest, my initial reaction was that I knew exactly what to do with it--dismiss it. That's mostly because the first paragraph is almost offensively hyperbolic. Graduate students do not, so far as I can tell, work in Dickensian environments; I tend to work in cheerful rooms and take frequent snack (and television) breaks. In fact, aside from the whole money thing, I think I've got a pretty goddamn good lifestyle going, mostly because I have so much flexibility in it.
I don't mean to get all utopian about it, though. I'm sure that the whole quality-of-life equation changes if you're at a school that demands a much higher teaching load, for example, and there is always (oh, there is always) the money thing. That's where I started to take the Voice article a little more seriously, when it started talking about the debt burden and the crap salaries of adjunct faculty. But I think that also factors in to my whole skepticism about the categorization of graduate students as an oppressed minority. I see an academic job as the endpoint of this whole PhD thing, but I have also been saying from the start that I'm willing to toss academia aside if the job search doesn't work out. If I complete dissertation and my academic job search and the only thing available to me is an adjunct position that pays eighteen thousand a year with no benefits, I'm leaving. I don't know what else a history PhD qualifies me to do, but I'll figure it out if I have to. (Actually, the Voice article opened up another door there: Beyond Academe, a website devoted entirely to the question of what else a history PhD qualifies me to do.)
I think I've spoken before (although maybe not on this site) about the dangers of the insular world of the graduate student. If your whole life is lived (metaphorically or literally) within the confines of your graduate program, of course you feel oppressed by the system. You have nothing to compare it to.