What Bronx Mowgli Really Means

December 1, 2008

Now that Thanksgiving is over, and the media hysteria over Bronx Mowgli has subsided, I can get back to some normal posting, hopefully.

But just a quick parting word on the subject of Bronx Mowgli. In the two and a half years I’ve been ‘covering’ celebrity baby names, I don’t think I’ve seen any celebrity baby name get the media and the blogosphere so riled up as the name Bronx Mowgli, which as everyone in the universe now knows is the name of Ashlee Simpson’s and Pete Wentz’s new baby boy.

‘Enough with the crazy celeb baby names!’ railed a blogger on Beliefnet.com, adding that the name gave them an ‘icky’ feeling’. Adam Proteau, writing on The Hockey News site, lamented that Bronx Mowgli sounded ‘more like a crude bedroom act than a decent name for a chiild’ (I have to say, hockey, baby names, and bedrooms do not seem to really belong in the same article). ‘Can celeb tots survive their names?’ intoned Adrienne Mand Lewin, on MSNBC, in one of the rare intelligent articles about the BM contretemps, wherein Ms. Mand Lewin reports that some grown up celeb kids actually like their uncommon names (gasp!)

Perhaps because there was such a firestorm (or perhaps to stoke it even hotter) Pete Wentz felt obliged to give a little explanation. He told one interviewer that he and Ashlee ‘bonded’ over The Jungle Book, and that they simply thought Mowgli was ‘a cool name.’ And why not?

But when it came to Bronx, Wentz refused to share with the world the thinking that went into it. He kept referring to the naming saga as a ‘narrative’ (whatever that means) and that ‘it’s kind of cool to just leave the narrative what it is.’ Exactly. What it is. And what it is, it’s time to move on. Little Bronx Mowgli will hopefully thrive, the world will keep spinning, and everyone who lost it over the name Bronx Mowgli, will, I hope, feel a little less ‘icky’ as time goes by. There are, after all, better things to get really worked up over than celebrity baby names, no matter how unusual.