^ In certain tribal regions of northeastern India, especially Meghalaya and Nagaland, it's quite common for parents to give their children names randomly drawn from history, popular culture or just in general "interesting"-sounding foreign words and phrases (often, but not necessarily, English ones)...everything from Ulysses to Toilet to Barrister to Boer War to Hilarious; the last time I was in India, I remember reading an article about the latest political initiative of a Meghalayan politican named Adolf Hitler Marak. There are a few tribes which specifically have a reputation for the custom of deliberately choosing 'humorous' names for one's children, but in most cases--and I'm guessing it's likely the same on Chuuk?--the parents likely held little or no associations with the word, phrase or name in its 'original' context. It's more a consequence of their traditional understanding of the 'proper' way to choose a name, which emphasizes above all that it must be completely unique; to discover that anyone else of your ethnic group happens to have the same name as you do would be mortifying, and naming a child after a long-deceased relative (or some word in the native language) is likewise almost unthinkable.
It's interesting how the traditional considerations involved in how one should choose a child's name vary so much across cultures and subcultures like that. We named our first child Akiva, which from a general Jewish POV is nothing particularly unusual for a boy--but, we're both from fairly traditional Sephardic families where the expectation is that you'll name all your children after fairly close relatives, and there's no known Akiva in either of our family trees, so all the grandparents were...not upset exactly, but they reacted somewhat the same way most grandparents today might to their grandchild being named 'Starlight' or something like that: um, well, it's nice I guess dear, pleasant associations and all that, but why would you turn to such "eccentric" word/name categories as a source for ideas?
