People want to name their kids something unique. I posted about the “Superman” kid from New Zealand who was not give the name “4real”. Now, one Chinese couple want to name their child “@”. Is it the immense amount of population and lack of something unique to name a new-born? I think they simply want their child different from the other kids around.

Well, there is a valid reason to call the child @. Chinese e-mail users often use the English word “at” to sound it out — which with a drawn out “T” sounds something like “ai ta,” or “love him,” to Mandarin speakers. They want everybody to love their child! Smart parents!!

“The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means ‘love him’,” the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming. Li did not say if officials accepted the “@” name. But earlier this year the government announced a ban on names using Arabic numerals, foreign languages and symbols that do not belong to Chinese minority languages.

Sixty million Chinese faced the problem that their names use ancient characters so obscure that computers cannot recognize them and even fluent speakers were left scratching their heads, said Li, according to a transcript of the briefing on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).

One of them was the former Premier Zhu Rongji, whose name had a rare “rong” character that gave newspaper editors headaches. (Reuters)