‘Is your name meme?: Woman says her name almost caused a divorce between her parents because of its strong similarity with a motor vehicle part
User @scaredandsobbing in a video she uploaded to TikTok two days ago recounted how her parents almost got divorced over what could have been her name: Angie. But what’s so wrong with that name? As it turns out, everything but the context is very important.
Taking viewers to the time of her birth, user @scaredandsobbing said that her mother had a difficult birthing experience, one that put her and her mother’s life at risk. The atmosphere was already tense. To add to the chaos, user @scaredandsobbing mentioned that her father fainted, which only made her mother more upset. As if that wasn’t enough, her mother was told she was having a boy, but it turned out to be a girl, and she hadn’t prepared any names for a girl. Unsure of what to name her daughter, she turned to her husband for suggestions, but the name he proposed made her furious, leading her to threaten him with divorce and say she would “beat the shi* out” of him.
User @scaredandsobbing’s father’s name suggestion for her as a child almost got him divorced
After user @scaredandsobbing provided viewers with little context of the events that transpired before the big incident, she finally revealed what almost led to her parents’ divorce. After her father was asked by her mother to come up with a name for their daughter, he had suggested Angie, but this prompted her mother to become furious. It turns out she had heard “Engine” and not Angie, and it led her to have an outburst and question her husband’s role as a father.
After this, user @scaredandsobbing’s father tried a couple of times to clarify what he was saying, but every time her mother heard “engine”, which finally prompted her to throw him out of the room. She then came up with a name of her own and ordered her father to put it down on the documents, which he did. However, he got the spelling wrong. User @scaredandsobbing closed her video, saying, “at least my name’s not engine.” Indeed!!
People are confused about user @scaredandsobbing’s name
A lot of people are poking fun at user @scaredandsobbing, partly because of her story and partly because of her TikTok profile name, which is put down as “Meme.” User @ariaforlif wrote, “Is your name meme (?)” User @brittany.brii, on the other hand, wrote, “I agree I like meme much better than engine.”
Many people on TikTok also believe that the name Angie suits user @scaredandsobbing. User @itssjustjuniper wrote, “This is the most angie looking and sounding person ever.” User @w_maryjane wrote, “The fact that angie would suit you so well…”
Common names are out, and uncommon names are in
According to an article published by The Guardian on November 13, 2025, parents these days are more inclined to give their children unique names over popular ones. A study published in Sage Journals on January 1, 2010, notes that based on an analysis of the names of 325 million American babies born between 1880 and 2007, the use of common baby names has experienced a steady decline, with the most significant rate of change observed during the 1990s.
So what triggered this movement? A lot of things. Kevin Schürer, who is a researcher at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, believes that giving rarely used names to one’s children stems from a desire to reinvent old customs of name picking. He says, “What we’ve really seen in the last 20-odd years is that anything goes. You have more individualistic names coming in, either using older names with relatively new spellings, and the rise of names based on popular culture. So you’re moving away from a standard stock of names.” He also attributes this phenomenon to popular culture and says that parents would be inclined to give their children the “names they like because they’re appearing on social media, television, and media sites.”
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
