No, there’s no mistake in that headline. Grimes recently revealed via Twitter reply that her daughter with Elon Musk, who was previously named “Exa Dark Sideræl” is now being called one of three equally absurd options. According to the singer, born Claire Elise Boucher like a normal person, people can refer to the child as either “Y,” “Why,” or just a question mark, although that last one won’t make it onto a birth certificate any time soon.
“She’s Y now, or ‘Why?’ or just ‘?’ (But the government won’t recognize that),” Grimes responded to a reply on a photo of her and her daughter in matching outfits. “[C]uriosity, the eternal question, .. and such.”
Grimes and Musk together appear to be physically incapable of coming up with a name for their kids that isn’t going to lead to them being socially ostracized or just super weird. In addition to this and “Exa Dark Sideræl” the now separated couple famously named their son “X Æ A-12,” which Musk later had to clarify is pronounced “X Ash A Twelve.”
Musk also “mostly” blamed Grimes for these names. He was probably too busy plotting how he was going to buy and ruin Twitter to come up with kids’ names at the time. However, Grimes said that she was originally fighting for the name “Odysseus Musk” for their daughter to Vanity Fair last December, thinking it would be a cool name for a girl.
“A girl named Odysseus is my dream,” she said.
Considering the source, there’s very little chance that these kids weren’t going to turn out weird, unless they did so specifically to annoy their parents. Grimes has not elaborated on the name change for her daughter since tweeting about it last week other than mentioning it in another profile for the magazine and presenting it as a counterpart to her brother’s nickname “X.”
Apparently that one didn’t sit well with Musk, so they opted for a name that takes a couple paragraphs to explain. Grimes also told Vanity Fair that “Exa” refers to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS, which is the ability to perform one quintillion floating-point operations per second, “Dark” refers to literal darkness or “the absence of photons,” and Sideræl is a Lord of the Rings reference.
There was also an explanation of how that was supposed to be pronounced, but since the name’s out anyway, we’re just going to keep referring to it as “Extra Dark Side Rail” in our heads.
Making fun of the ridiculous things rich and famous people name their kids is a storied American pastime, and since Grimes and Musk have come up with some of the weirdest yet, they have definitely been the butt of a lot of name-related jokes. This weekend was no exception after it was revealed that they sometimes refer to their daughter by a punctuation mark.
