Kevinism
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
In my limited experience, this is the norm, not an exception.
That doesn't stop with the -ism's, I routinely run into programmers learning about DRY and cargo-culting the hell out of it. People seize onto absolute rules and superficiality, failing to consider deeper conceptual dissimilarities that would negate the application of the rule.
Yes, you can interpret it so it makes sense.
No, that sensible interpretation isn't the one that caught on.
It has a nasty symbiotic relationship with the "But you're one of the good ones" phenomenon, which is what you're more directly referring to.
Edit: Might as well leave a link for regular people https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/virgin-vs-chad
In your interactions with the other Kevins of Germany, have you encountered any of these Alpha-Kevins? Are they held in particularly high esteem in Kevinish circles?
I could see the same mechanism in socio-economic disadvantaged parents. Their world is limited by money, not borders, but they still want to be part of the larger world.
https://www.reddit.com/r/StoriesAboutKevin/
“What is a Kevin?
A Kevin is someone who consistently or greatly shows a complete lack of intelligence through incompetence of social and societal norms, or is purposefully antagonistic in their poor decision making. Remember the kid in your class who would constantly get in trouble for really dumb things? He was probably a Kevin. Family members, friends, coworkers, and classmates can all become Kevins.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_the_Teenager
Or perhaps an example is better
Harry Enfield's Kevin the Teenager has very middle class parents (for those not from the UK we regard "middle class" as describing a much wider social group than say in the USA where it might be based on income. It's basically not working class and not a member of the aristocracy. Could be a QC, a CEO or school teacher.)
The earlier meaning was more pejorative and something closer to a being a "chav". Like chavs in the early 00s were supposed to wear fake Burberry check products, kevs were supposed to wear white socks and black shoes. I have no idea why.
> for those not from the UK we regard "middle class" as describing a much wider social group than say in the USA where it might be based on income. It's basically not working class and not a member of the aristocracy. Could be a QC, a CEO or school teacher.
I don't know what a QC is, but a CEO of a non-Fortune 500 company would probably be upper middle class, and a school teacher would be lower middle class unless they're in a very expensive private school. I don't know that it's strictly based on income, necessarily, as much as how much independence the job provides; whether it's a job or a career, in other words.
Actually your definition is not that dissimilar to what we’d understand too. I think it’s not too different to white collar vs blue collar. Attitude to education fits in there somewhere too.
He loved it.
[0] https://www.codingitforward.com/fellowship
[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/117Q3zuyWulkDGcGXp4Bd...
These last years, I also hear people using "Jean-Kévin" instead.
Who says Germans don't have a sense of humour?
Alpha-Kevin is a term I'll have to use more often
Examples: Rikárdó, Armandó, Rodrigó, Dzsenifer (Jennifer), Dzsesszika (Jessica), Brájen (Brian), Dzsásztin (Justin), Brendon, Szamanta, Eszmeralda
Seems to be a universal thing across many countries that people in low socio-economic classes (black people in the US or Roma in Eastern Europe) give more, let's say, "unusual" names to their kids.
There are too many of us for names to be a unique identifier. First names are too generic to say anything about us, and they're usually assigned at birth, before any of our traits are known.
Family names are even worse; here's your father's last name glued on to yours, for no apparent reason. Or maybe your mother's. Or, if you want, in Belgium, a hyphenated version of both parents', but excluding any hyphenated part of theirs. This somehow implies that family is important, but only a small part of your family? I don't get that in a modern context.
Iain M Banks had an interesting take on multi-part names in The Culture, with the naming scheme at least featuring a chosen name. But sadly also including things you have no control over, like place of birth and parentage.
Letting everyone pick their own name would be nice. That's apparently already possible in some parts of the world, but not everywhere. And often you can only change it if your name is truly ridiculous or if you share a name with a serial killer or some such.
It's not something you can get done at a whim or frequently of course. The judge will weigh the needs of society (i.e., to be able to consistently refer to citizens by a constant name in various types of records) against your personal motivation for changing names.
Sometimes the judges can get a bit lazy about actually filtering requests. Jesus Christ literally lives in New York.
(Or Kris Kringle for that matter.)
One of the common sense criteria is you're not allowed to assume the identity of well known public figures or entities.
You need to execute a 'deed poll' if you want the new name recorded on official documents, or accepted by organisations like banks. [1] www.gov.uk/change-name-deed-poll
And even that depends on what state you're in. For example, Texas doesn't require it (source: I legally changed my name in Texas in 2014).
And some states that do require it can waive the requirement if you can demonstrate that you have legitimate privacy concerns and the judge is sympathetic; e.g. if you're changing your name to hide from an abusive family member or if you're transgender.
On the other hand, many states require a clean record in order to change your name. Using Texas as an example again, I had to do a fingerprint background check before they would even schedule my court date. My record was clean, but if I had a criminal record, I would've only been allowed to change my name under limited circumstances.
It forever complicates your life as many official correspondences will ask if you've ever been known by a different name, and require you to provide documentation that the change was official and what your previous name was.
It's only a small hassle, and not many people do it as a percentage, but the option is there.
> All of them are a little weird but one is free - you can effectively write to one of the courts in London to say you have been known by a different name for some time, so would like your official records updated to that new name - but this route is unconventional and somewhat archaic.
This is an enrolled deed-poll. It's not free, it costs £36. It's not unconventional. It's a commonly used method because it's the change that is most widely accepted by other organisations.
> The more often used method (deed poll) costs £35 and takes a couple of weeks
Deed-polls are free. You can write your own, or you can download a template from the Internet.
We don't have legal names in England. You can change your own name at any time, for any reason, so long as you don't have the intent to defraud. You can change it to almost anything you like.
There are three methods:
If you're over 18 you can just stop using your old name and start using your new name. This is just as valid as any other name change method. It doesn't work well because banks and doctors tend to ignore it.
The next step up is to use a deed poll. This is free. It's just a piece of paper saying that you've stopped using your old name and you're only going to be using your new name from now on. A deed poll is just a written version of the first step. For some reason having it in writing helps people accept it more. But some banks don't accept this form of deed poll.
The next step up is an enrolled deed poll. You take your deed poll and you enroll it at the Royal Courts of Justice and have it published in The Gazette. It costs £36. This form should be accepted by everyone. Because it's cheap, and because it's accepted by banks, and because it makes life easier, this is the version that most people chose.
Interesting to read that there is no legal need to enrol, and that statutory declarations or just affidavits can be used instead. But the enrolled deed-poll is the one that's going to make your life easiest AFAICT.
Did your parents not give you multiple names?
My parents gave me multiple names, and I've done the same with my child. We gave our child a relatively short, practical name, with the other 2 names being longer and more "luxury". Same as I have. I also grew up with a mother who used her second name. The main annoyance I have is that my first name is common (therefore chance there's another person with same name around), and native variation in my country yet not easily pronounceable in English. I just use a different variation or shorten it.
As for the last name, I find the old Nordic way interesting. Iceland apparently still uses it, see [1] for details.
Multiple names are pretty uncommon here, except for multi-word names like Jean-Luc etc. There's an old custom of naming your child $first $godfather->first $godmother->first $last, but that's slowly dying out. It's why many Belgian males havie Marie as a third name.
Too right. When we had to name a child, I took all the CSV files of every child names in Scotland for last 15 years (Scottish Government provides all the raw statistics for every name) and loaded the data set into elasticsearch where I was then able to construct visualisations and trends of candidate names and get ideas etc.
It is quite a burden to think of a name for a child.
My wife and I had a son this year, and took care to give him a name that would work well in any situation. He has two given names (we do too), so he has a backup name in case the first one doesn't suit him later on (my wife uses her second name, because her parents figured it suited her better after a year).
We didn't use any technology beyond the publicly availalbe Dutch database for given names in use, but we did look for a pair of names that would look good on a resume as well as work well in daily conversation. They are old names that should hold up well regardless of what is en vogue at the moment.
I hope he likes them.
Old fashioned names are fine but I didn't want to choose a name that had just been popular 10 years ago and curse child with a faintly aunty-ish name for rest of her life, and didn't want to choose a name that might be about to become hugely popular either. At the same time didn't want a "unique flower" kind of name. A name with 10-50 children being named that each year and not wildly ascending or descending was in the sweet spot.
"Kev" has been slang for someone from a low socioeconomic background, possibly violent, often paired with "Sharon" or "Tracy" as a female equivalent.
So as an aspirational western name I'm not sure it works! At least for the English...
The stereotypical kev was supposed to be seen wearing white, fluffy socks and black shoes (terrible faux pas that) and driving a Ford Capri (badly).
At the time this greatly amused me as a child because my well to do Irish grandfather, uncle and cousin were all called Kevin and nothing at all like the stereotype. Not sure if the term "kev" existed as a mild insult in Ireland but they were all aware of us using it... :D
Well, not for Chantal, which is not a very exotic name here.
If you meet a boy named Jayden (the present day Dutch Kevin I guess?), you can be pretty sure his parents didn't go to college. This information should be irrelevant, but in reality it is used by whoever they meet, consciously or unconsciously.
The problem with these imported and new names is that it places a long lasting, nigh indelible stigma on their bearer. A label that everyone can see — yet you'll never know if it affects someone's opinion of you. All you might know is that the net effect of your name is negative until society changes its perception of it (i.e., gets used to it).
In Poland it's Brian for a boy and Jessica for a girl. Often spelled phonetically (Brajan, Dżesika).
Home Alone came out in 1990.
Kevin does have some lingering association; the lower socio-economic class stigma is there, but not that strong. Keep in mind that for someone born in an Anglo-Saxon country, that stigma would not necessarily apply. It tends to be limited to Dutch-born folk.
Chantal on the other hand seems to carry a much stronger connotation of a lower class background.
Here's the scene (somewhat NSFW, I guess) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GUyKG96xlsk
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/kinderschokolade-wuetender...
Translation:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
I'm trying to think of something equivalent from Canada, when I was younger, but nothing is really springing to mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/16/opinion/observer-the-kevi...
I was on vacation in Sweden shortly thereafter, and while just about every German thought the name atrocious, befitting a prostitute, all the Swedes found it charming.
Here's a German article about it: https://www.welt.de/kultur/article163980590/Der-Herbst-des-H...
I suppose that says something about the name's image.
The Kyle's are on the vanguard with their +10 Monster Energy buff
I need to talk to your manager.
It also says, tautologically, that "Kyle jokes parody of a certain kind of person with a set of characteristics one associates with the name"
I can confirm that there is indeed a stigma associated with the name. As a white young male though, being grumpy about such thing would be quite disproportionate. In that sense, it sort of makes me get an idea of what it could be like to be ridiculed for something one has no control or responsibility about.