Alphabet Juice

[snopes]

Sound symbolism, for its part, was no friend of the American woman in the throes of labor who overheard what struck her as the most beautiful word in the English language and named her newborn daughter Meconium, the medical word for fetal excrement.

This has the ring of an urban legend, a tendentious one, like Ronald Reagan's mink-coated woman stepping from a limousine to claim her welfare check. If there was a woman who gave her baby girl such a name, she had a highly idiosyncratic ear. (Of the thousand most common female names according to the 1990 census, Miriam was the only one ending in m, and it was 285th.) Salmonella, maybe, or Campho-Phenique, but Meconium? No. This mother -- I will stop short of saying that linguisticians conjured her up, consciously or unconsciously, to reinforce their denial of so much evidence of the senses, but I will say that this mother is not, in this respect, a good example.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/bo...bet-juice.html

[Eddylizard]

Mrs. L. when pregnant was quite keen on the name 'Candida' (another name for thrush [Candida Albicans] ) if it was a girl. Fortunately I managed to talk her out of it, and we settled on 'Penny'. Irrelevant really as we had a boy.

[Chloe]

Originally Posted by Eddylizard

Mrs. L. when pregnant was quite keen on the name 'Candida' (another name for thrush) for a girl.

There are loads of women called "Mavis"!

[Eddylizard]

Originally Posted by Chloe

There are loads of women called "Mavis"!

I'm afraid you're going to have to explain that to me.

[Chloe]

Originally Posted by Eddylizard

I'm afraid you're going to have to explain that to me.

It means thrush. http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis

[musicgeek]

But the "Candida" thrush isn't a bird thrush - it's essentially a nasty yeast infection.

(I apologize if you knew this and the "Mavis" joke went sailing over my head.)

[Eddylizard]

Originally Posted by Chloe

It means thrush. http://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mavis

Ahh. I see the misunderstanding.

What Musicgeek said.