Feel Like a Weenie? A Change of Your Name Could Be the Answer to the Curse : Laughingstocks: Southern California qualifies as capital of the movement away from names that heap ridicule on their bearers.

Like an arrow through his pride, Robin Hood suffered the stupid jokes. The 45-year-old San Diegan didn’t have an arch-rival named the Sheriff of Nottingham, he would say once more. How many times did he have to repeat that he did NOT live in Sherwood Forest. And, if he were going to rob from the rich, he’d keep it.

Likewise, the Oscar Meyer meat company did nothing for Ken Weiner’s self-esteem. As a kid on the streets of Brooklyn, he cringed each time he heard the company’s catchy TV jingle. A wiener by any other spelling was not what he truly wished to be. His friends never let him forget that his name was a hot dog--or, years later, a dork. A dweeb. A real wiener.

Bruce Reck had also heard the jokes. His cronies around Costa Mesa called him “Nervous” for short. And was he going to name his first child Otto?

So, recently, the three Southland residents finally put a stop to all the zingers, stingers, one-liners and confusion. Like thousands of other Southland residents each year, they changed their names.

Kenneth Scott Weiner is Kenneth W. Scott. Bruce Reck is Bruce Todd. And the former Robin Hood is so intent on making a clean break from his previous identity that he doesn’t want his new name published.

For about $300--including court fees and miscellaneous charges for copies and parking--people like Hood, Weiner and Reck quickly and quietly solve their curious brand of identity crisis.

In the ethnically diverse Southland, many names simply become cross-cultural casualties. Some immigrants find the surname that served them well at home takes a wrong turn in their adopted homeland--such as the Korean native who soon learned that Dung Heip suggested something repulsive in English-speaking San Diego.

A national expert estimates that one in five surname switches nationwide occur in Southern California, making this region the country’s name-change capital. Each year in Los Angeles County alone, more than 10,000 people change their names. The number in San Diego County is far smaller, 446 in fiscal 1992--but that was a 25% increase over th previous year.

The Hollywood crowd is famous for its new and improved stage names. Remember the late Muzyad Yakhoob, who starred in the ‘50s television comedy “Make Room for Daddy”? Or Alphonso D’Abruzzo as Dr. Hawkeye Pierce in “MASH”? You probably think they were always known as Danny Thomas and Alan Alda. And Jacob Cohen? He still doesn’t get any respect--even after changing his name to Rodney Dangerfield.

But legions of local residents probably will never see their new names on a cineplex marquee, people whose new identities are no more famous than their old ones.

Take Khang Vuong, now Tyrone Vuong. Lucky Barbara Lotto became Barbara Alexander. Jay Getzoff is now Jay Stevens. Kevin Klutz became Kevin Kluetz. And Charles Lee Rainey? He, er, she’s now Charlene Rainey.

Hood was just a simple guy, a defense-industry worker in San Diego who made stained glass in his spare time. And his only merry band of followers consisted of his wife and two kids.

The day he was born, the hospital nurses thought it would be funny to name the baby Robin. His mother laughed.

Years later, he tried to roll with the punches. He named his son, John, so that when wise-acres at parties asked where Little John was, he could say, “home in bed.” And he even named his fledging business Sherwood Glass.

Then, five years ago, he got fed up. He changed his name and never looked back.

“I’m a different person, absolutely,” he said. “Now I have a name that I chose myself, not something just handed to me. Nobody laughs any more when I introduce myself.

“And, whenever I meet someone with a strange name, I tell them how easy it is to change it. I know. Nobody should have to live through the hell of having a name they don’t like.”

Experts say the great number of anxious name-changers suggests how seriously people consider the names by which they are called.

“For many people, a name change can be better than plastic surgery. It’s a form of therapy for those who literally want to become someone else,” said Ralph Slovenko, a professor of law and psychiatry at Wayne State University School of Law in Detroit, who has published several articles in professional journals on sociological issues that surround name changes.

Only a few generations after countless European immigrants were forced to change their family surnames when passing through immigration checkpoints such as Ellis Island, he said, many Americans are returning their Anglicized names to the ethnic roots.

Slovenko criticized parents who bestow embarrassing names on their children--in effect, submitting them to the anguish of a boy named Sue. Topping his most-infamous list are the man named Hogg who named his daughter Ima. Or the unfortunate girl branded with the name Shanda Lear.

Then there’s the Hawaiian who named his daughter, “Jessica the Heavenly Beauty Who Loves England and Was Born the Year of the Queen’s Jubilee.” The girl is called Jubi for short.

“This is really another form of child abuse,” he said. “Can you think of anything more important than a person’s name? People live with their names. They identify with them. Some parents name their children after personal heroes so they’ll have something to aspire to. And then there are those who commit crimes when naming their children.”

From her desk in Superior Court in downtown Los Angeles, Dorothy Holmes has heard just about every name in the book. For eight years, she worked in the court’s name-change office, otherwise known as Department 1A.

She’s seen mothers who changed their toddler’s name to Strawberry or Yahoo; parents who named their twins Donald and Daisy, and the mother who called her daughter Cherry Blossom. And then there was the Asian father who wanted to change the names of his three preschool-aged boys to Faith, Hope and Charity.

“What are these parents thinking?” Holmes asked. “I told this guy, ‘I’m not trying to poke my nose into your business, but do you know how cruel kids can be? When your boys go to school, they’ll be the laughingstock of the classroom.’ But the father wouldn’t listen to me.”

Sometimes the name change office can be a painful place. Like the day a tearful young woman told court officials she wanted a new name because of sheer shame. Her father had just been convicted of murder, she explained, and she couldn’t live with that.

And there are the sex change cases.

“We get a lot of walking disasters in here,” Holmes said. “There’s people with sex change operations that didn’t take, men still talking like men. They want feminine names but their hands are still big and hairy. And those voices! Low as a croak.”

Maria Osborne, an 18-year-old student from El Monte, appeared for another delicate reason: After being abandoned by the child’s father, she was changing her 4-month-old son’s name.

The no-account daddy was gone, she said. So he could take his name right along with him.

“He doesn’t get the privilege of having my son carry his name,” she said quietly, her lips pursed. “It’s that simple.”