Before K-Anna Stephens posted her daughter’s name to the Facebook group “that name is a tragedeigh,” she knew that the response wasn’t going to be kind. Internet strangers aren’t usually known for being nice, and the more than 154,000 group members were gathered specifically to mock and judge “tragic names.”

Stephens herself knows how hard it is to have a distinctive name. Named after a grandmother and distant relative (Kay Anna), she’s heard all kinds of pronunciations and remarks, and dealt with the never-ending headache of trying to submit the dash in “K-Anna” on government websites and filing systems. Still, she says, at almost 30 years old, she’s become desensitized to it.

Still, even K-Anna Stephens, with her three decades of unique name experience, didn’t know just how mean the internet could get when it came to her daughter’s name: Sadilynn.

“It’s Say-di-lynne,” Stephens tells Vox of the pronunciation. “After the first 10 or 20 comments, I turned the comments off and tried to forget about the post.”

Sadilynn, Stephens says, came about because she liked the name “Sadie” pronounced like Sadie Hawkins. A relative told her he had a dog named Sadie, which prompted her to add -lynn, combining her first choice with another name she liked. In 2016, when Sadilynn was born, Stephens says she noticed parents using -eigh and -lynn sounds in their children’s names and followed the trend.

When she submitted Sadilynn to the Facebook group — and it’s worth noting, there’s a similar congregation on Reddit called r/Tragedeigh, with 764,000 weekly users — she was looking for constructive criticism. What she got was a deluge of insults about her education, her sanity, her finances, her employment status, and her lack of compassion for her daughter.

“How would I put that into words? Like, Oh, my God, she’s one of those people. Was she on drugs during pregnancy? What was going through her head?” Stephens tells me. “Those comments, they’re quite literally what’s in the back of my head.”

Alternatively spelled names are a peculiar trend — inherently hard to track, since uniqueness is a key factor. But they’re undoubtedly inspiring both copycats and vitriol, often rising into the public consciousness through mockery. What’s behind the drive to create these one-in-a-billion names? Why do they garner so much abuse, so much that they can sustain multiple internet forums with six-figure memberships? What do they mean for the children who bear them, and why do they make unrelated adult strangers so, so, so very upset?

As with so many things we dislike, our ire says a lot more about us than it does about any child named Sadilynn.

Jetsyn? That’s a beautiful name for a girl!

According to baby name experts and linguists, the insertion of Ys or addition of features like a -lynne or -eigh to a more common, already-existing name are part of a trend known as “alternatively spelled” or “uniquely spelled” names, more colloquially and less professionally referred to as “Utah Mom” names.

“Utah is sort of an early warning system for things that are going to become popular,” Cleveland Evans, a professor and former president of the American Name Society, told NPR earlier this year when speaking about the rise of Oaklynne, Oaklee, Oakleigh, and its variants. Perhaps the most internet famous example of Utah Mom naming conventions is “

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