Uglier Than Ahmus

In my first month of attending Pitzer College, I met a lot of new people with a lot of new names. By new, I mean names that are considered cultural or unique. Growing up in Connecticut, my peers almost uniformly had traditional anglo names, so it was one of the first times I met people with names with minimal vowels and that didn't litter The Bible. Though I didn't have a knack for pronouncing these names, I was still excited to try.

At some point during that first month, I was chatting with a new group of friends about other students who we were getting to know.

Someone commented, "Ug, he's uglier than a moose."
Not knowing the person to whom the comparison was being made, I asked naively, "Who's Ahmus?"
The friend responded, "What? No, a moose. Like the animal."
"Oh, I thought Ahmus might be Pakistani or something."

Yup, in my attempt to be completely PC and hip to kids from different ethnic backgrounds, I basically made up a name. There was a good laugh at my expense, followed by a pact by about ten people present for the conversation: we'd all name our firstborns Ahmus. Since it's a made up name to begin, we'd all have the freedom to apply it to either gender and invent our own cultural origin/meaning to it. At our twenty year college reunion, we'd all come back with our families and our kids, our little Ahmuses, would interact and for the first times in their lives meet someone else who shared their name. Then they'd meet another one. And another one. Soon they'd recognize that they received these names as part of some stupid college inside joke. Then the Ahmuses will resent us parents even more for giving them that name. Whatever, though, they were going to be moody anyway... I mean, who's going to ask an "Ahmus" to prom?