Coming up with the best name for your baby is important. The name choice sets them up for what life throws at them. But if the name you select also reflects a major disaster that happened in the world at one point, with 31 deaths recorded, it’s a little less adorable and a little more impossible to understand. That’s what happened when someone on Reddit shared a baby shower invite received with the baby’s, well, unique name choice written on it. Besides the name, the invite promises guests the celebration of the “arrival of a little bundle of joy!”
In that regard, the baby shower invite is totally normal. But the baby’s name is where some people are scratching their heads out of confusion. Others used it as the perfect opportunity to make puns based on the name choice.
The baby’s name is almost too unusual to be real.
The person’s post on Reddit describes being “speechless” after receiving an invite to a baby shower wherein the parents named the baby Chernobyl Hope. That’s right: They chose a radiation disaster in Ukraine (in the Soviet Union at the time) as their baby’s namesake. If you need a little lesson in world history, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl plant exploded in 1986, releasing toxic radiation into the atmosphere, per the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In total, about 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes to relocate to areas outside of the blast zone. Today, radiation still exists in the area, though tourists can visit Chernobyl and can even enter the exclusion zone, where radiation levels are higher. According to the energy agency, however, the levels are only safe for short periods of exposure.
After the Reddit poster shared the baby shower invite, some couldn’t believe the name or even the invitation was real.
“I refuse to believe this is real lol,” one Redditor commented.
The original poster replied, “I have a feeling they don’t know what Chernobyl meant. I asked them where they got the idea from and [they] said it just sounded nice????”
Someone else urged the poster to tell the couple about the meaning behind the name before the time comes after the child is born.
“This is so, so bad,” the person commented. “They have to be told. Give them a book about Chernobyl as a gift for the baby shower. Because no.”
As someone else pointed out, full of hope (no pun intended): “Thankfully it’s just the baby shower; there’s still time for someone to talk sense into them.”
People came up with some puns to go along with the name.
The other Redditors who commented on the thread were quick to come up with snappy puns involving nuclear reactors. One person commented, clearly as a joke, “I’m sure everyone at the celebration will be radiant.”
Someone else wrote, “If that was my name, I’d go nuclear.”
Another commenter joked about being able to count eight reasons “on one hand” why the name Chernobyl Hope is not a good idea. This was, of course, a play on the mutations animals faced after exposure to radiation in the area after the explosion.
Redditors really had fun with this one. When someone else wrote, “Oh, there’s bound to be some fallout from this,” another Redditor replied, “She’ll still come out glowing and amazing to all!”
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
