A Pet Peeve

As an addendum to the post below: another minor annoyance is Palin's choice of children's names. I've written about this sort of thing before: what is it with Christian parents who take part in the fad of blessing their children with trendy, relatively meaningless names? If one were a pagan (or a Hollywood celebrity), it's entirely understandable; name your child Skyler or Jaden if you wish, Jock or Infiniti--what does it matter? But Christians belong to a long tradition of giving their children names imbued with substance, dignity, character, and power. There are a myriad to choose from: the Apostles, Popes, saints, and martyrs, all with perfectly beautiful and, what's more, meaningful names, names that not only, in some mystical sense, determine a child's character, but indicate the child's lifelong patron saint and guardian. But Christian parents (including too many Catholics) generally clueless of this most honorable and necessary custom eschew tradition for trend--and we end up with colorful appellations like Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper, and Trig. The weighty reasons given behind the titles? Mr. Palin answers:

Sarah's parents were coaches and the whole family was involved in track and I was an athlete in high school, so with our first-born, I was, like, 'Track!' Bristol is named after Bristol Bay. That's where I grew up, that's where we commercial fish. Willow is a community there in Alaska. And then Piper, you know, there's just not too many Pipers out there and it's a cool name. And Trig is a Norse name for "strength."

If his parents had done a bit more research on the Nordic name, they would have discovered Trig is a moniker more often given to dogs than to men.