The power couple comprising billionaire Paypal co-founder and electric car subsidy grifter Elon Musk and the Canadian pop singer Claire Elise Boucher, who goes by the stage name Grimes, has announced the name of their new baby. The little guy is christened X Æ A-12.
Grimes expressed a desire to let the child, who has male sex organs, determine its own gender identity as it grows up. This is called treating it as a gender-neutral “theyby.” Musk, for his part, says it’s a dude. Parenting sure is fraught with jargon and ethical quandaries these days.
Sometimes, the news delivers an item that obligates the weekly words writers of the world to answer some basic questions that are burning in the inquiring minds of news consumers. This week is one of those times. Where did the name X Æ A-12 come from? Did someone lose a bet to find a stupider name than Elon? How does this man have a billion dollars while I do not? How do you pronounce X Æ A-12?
The name reads as if it were an online password autogenerated for security strength. Indeed, ironically enough, my (now former) autogenerated password for my Paypal account is actually X Æ B-13! Out of leads on what the name means, I asked a friend who studied Latin at Oxford to help me figure out how to say it. The letter Æ, I learned, is a diphthong, or a sound created by combining two vowels. It is called an “ash,” and pronounced like “aye.” The word diphthong contains no diphthongs, he enjoyed telling me, because he is a nerd. This did not help me learn to pronounce X Æ A-12, because I still don’t know if I am supposed to say the dash as “dash,” or as “through,” such as in K-12, or what. My guess is it’s like “Chai-yaythroo-twelve.” Who knows?
Remember when crazy celebrity names were quaintly normal things such as Blue Ivy and North West and Apple? X Æ A-12 does communicate something, though, even if I have no idea what it means. Musk and Grimes are actively trying to demonstrate that they disregard ordinary human naming conventions in every way and want their child, who actually has to live with the moniker, to serve as a sort of totem for their own sophistication. But they are sophisticated only in their ludicrousness, which has produced this gem of a bizarre name that sounds like a very stoned person’s answer to the writing prompt, “What would the tail number of an ancient Roman spaceship be?”
All of this put me in mind of a November 2018 story I faintly recalled in the Washington Post, which begins: “A Texas mother is calling out a Southwest Airlines employee who she said mocked her 5-year-old daughter’s name and then posted a picture of the small child’s boarding pass on social media. Traci Redford told ABC affiliate KABC her daughter’s name is Abcde, which is pronounced ‘ab-si-dee.’”
Perhaps Musk, Grimes, and Ms. Redford can join together and form some sort of club for parents who are subjected to this kind of rude and unfair treatment through no fault of their own. It is important that they do what they can to help their children avoid being bullied and mocked. They can call it the PTÆ.
