Maybe it was easier when we gave the kids good Spanish Catholic names?
Shakespeare said a rose by another other name would smell as sweet. He hadn't met any Dominicans.
Dominicans are notorious for making up names that are fabulously unpronounceable to the American monolingual crowd. Before I was Aliza, I had a beautiful name that rolled off the tongue, a transmutation of my parents' names and initials. But it stopped sounding so graceful when I got to elementary school where it was butchered time and time again (and frequently got me marked absent) until I finally changed it to Aliza after converting to Judaism. (By the way it's Ahh-leee-zah, not Eliza Doolittle. See, sometimes, you can't win either way.)
My little sister followed suit by changing her name, too. My parents hadn't realized that the name they had given her, however cleverly misspelled, was the pupal stage for butterflies. Unfortunately, for my sister, her friends realized this during a class science experiment. She changed her name to something rather boring sounding but in keeping with Dominican tradition, spelled rather creatively.
But apparently, Dominican names have gotten so bizarre lately that The LA Times had to write about it in a piece called "Dear Pineapple?' 'Dummy Ruiz?' Dominican Republic considers banning bizarre names". A judge is trying to hard to ban names that glorify car brands, drugs, cartoon characters and even body parts (someone named their child "Breast" in Spanish). Is this an infringement of civil liberties or just protection against child abuse? Ask Dear Pineapple and her friends, Mazda Altagracia, and, of course, Dummy Ruiz.
