Portland, OR – At 5:03 yesterday afternoon, an exhausted but elated Tim and Kathy Fensworth welcomed into the world their brand new, healthy 8-lb. baby boy ;P, who is the first ever person to be named an emoticon.
The couple, who were reportedly neither drunk nor high at the time of the baby’s naming, said they had actually been leaning toward the name :0 as recently as last week but were holding off on making a decision.
“We knew that we wanted to name the baby a smiley-face variant, since Kat and I use them basically all the time when we text each other,” explained proud new dad Tim. “But we wanted to wait until we saw him to make it official. It wasn’t going to be some rash decision that we jumped into and ended up regretting later. Sure enough, when the little guy came wiggling out, making this wacky face with one eye closed and his tongue sticking out, we just knew. We knew we were looking right at ;P Adam Fensworth.”
Surprisingly, the Fensworths were unaware that theirs was the first child in history to be named a text facial expression.
“Wow, really?” said Kathy as she typed “;P” twice into a text message — once referring to her newborn son, once to evoke a silly emotion at the end of a sentence. “We’d assumed that there were already tons of emoticon-named kids over in Japan.”
“To learn that our precious little ;P is the first of his kind,” Kathy added, “well, it just makes it that much more special.”
Unfortunately for ;P, however, phonetics experts agree that every person he ever comes into contact with will have trouble pronouncing his name.
“Punctuation marks simply aren’t all that easy to pronounce,” said Doug Barlow, professor of linguistics at the University of Portland. “Smart money says he’ll be going by Adam before preschool.”
Dr. Peter DeCarlo, who delivered ;P, also thought that an emoticon was an odd name choice. “You see all kinds of crazy names in this profession,” Dr. DeCarlo said. “Blue Ivy, Magic Blanket, Bronx, but this one takes the cake. Good luck finding one of those little toy license plates with this kid’s name on it.”
The Fensworths, meanwhile, felt ;P suited their son perfectly, and couldn’t wait to get him home to their dog %.
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