What's in a name ?

Unsurprisingly Lord Patel has been keeping an eye on the state of the German nation and has in his lifelong pursuit of knowledge, uncovered, what is for him an extraordinary feature of European life that has hitherto escaped his knowledge.

In Germany when registering a childs birth and name at your local Standesamt, the officials can reject your choice, by law, if it fails to meet two criteria...

(1) It must reflect the sex of the child

(2) it must not endanger the 'well-being of the child.

To make life easier for themselves, Registry offices in Germany have an "International Handbook of Forenames," updated in 2002. The name law generates so many unresolved questions that there are expert "name offices" in Wiesbaden and Leipzig.The Language Society also helps navigate the minefield, responding to several thousand requests each year from residents (but mainly immigrants) seeking guidance on names before they go to the Standesamt.

"I receive more than 3,000 questions about forenames every year," says Gabriele Rodriguez, from the name office at the University of Leipzig.

So a German couple, fans of the dreadful and hideous Whoopi Goldberg wishing to name their child Whoopi had their choice rejected. (The 1990 US census showed that German-Americans were the largest single ethnic group in the United States with 57,947,374 persons or 23.3 % of the US population claimed some form of Germanic ancestry—German, Austrian, or German Swiss.)

That the State wants to interfere and micromanage your life seems inconceivable to US and UK citizens.

The practice has misty and historical origins - which released from, the Jews who emigrated to the US enjoyed, so they could discard their unwanted names and start afresh. Especially when The Nazi regime required every male Jew without an identifiably Jewish surname to adopt the middle name "Israel" and every such female Jew to adopt the middle name "Sarah." These names were placed on their national identity cards to make it harder for them to evade all the many restrictions imposed on Jews, and in the end, harder to avoid being murdered.

Of course these rules also stretch to cover adult name changes on marriage,especially forbidding hyphenated names, ont the curious supposition that a child named Schmidt-Kohl might marry a Brandt- Merkl and burden their children with a quadruple name.

This nonsense is not limited in Europe to Germany.

In Portugal the Registrars have asked to be released from the burden of having to apply the rules of the Ministry of Justice (by a law of 1911) whose Web site details 39 pages of legally acceptable first names, from Aarao to Zuleica, and 41 pages of unacceptable ones.Lolita, Maradonna and Mona Lisa are out, as are Guevara, Marx and Rosa Luxemburgo and Ovnis. OVNI is Portuguese for UFO..

In 2002, Norway replaced its list with a general standard that bans swear words, sex words, negative names and sicknesses.

A Danish law, that took effect on April 1,2006 expands approved lists to include names from the United States, Europe and other countries, and allows parents to apply for unlisted names.

The Swedish parliament has commissioned the government to overhaul its Personal Names Act of 1982...Parents wanting to use the name Twilight had to go to the Supreme Administrative Court before winning approval.

Spain has several acceptable name lists,(any other name being unacceptable) corresponding to regional languages like Catalan and Basque.

Slovakia, forbids first names that are "eccentric, derogatory or ludicrous" (parents can't name a child "Cigarette," for instance). It also generally bans hyphenated last names for children -- although the Ministry of Interior says it makes an exception for the children of hyphenated foreigners living in Slovakia.

Extraordinary.