I never liked my name as a kid. Elsa. So old-lady. So Old World. I wanted to have one of those hip, young, child-of-the-seventies names. Stevie. Vicki. Shelley. Not Jennifer or Lisa or Tracy, though. Lori. That would have been fine.

Elsa, I thought, brought more than my share of name teasing. Smelsa. Ulcer. Enorrrrrrmous Elsa. I was the only person suffering from having her name turned into something mean and ugly. Funny how, as children, our persecution can't possibly be anything someone else could understand, or so we think.

Well, of course everyone can be the target of taunts. I grew up with kids who had much more taunt-worthy names than I did: Leslie Butts. Kelly Dick. Jennifer Adcock.

Today I was listening to a reporter on the local NPR affiliate, and realized that there was someone who must have really had it bad as a kid. I'm assuming her name is the one she was born with, of course, and not one that she assumed in order to garner professional attention. Her name?

Sprince Arbogast.

Yup, Sprince. What would you even make of that, as a mean kid with a need for cruelty? I thought of spritz cookies, the sugar delights that my grandmother would squeeze out of a metal tube and serve at Christmas time.

A local blog described her as "the weekend Metro traffic person with the made-up sounding name. She's kind of mysterious about her background." She shows up on some website about "KidStar", but her connection is unclear. Here's what she looks like. If I saw her on the street, I'd think Melissa, not Sprince. Hmmm.



Name teasing rule I forgot to mention: if you're hot, you can have a name like Sprince Arbogast and no one will tease you. At least not to your face.