Baby names

I'll remind everyone once agin of those Laws Of American Nomeclature.

1.People give their girls boys' names or surnames because those names seem Cute Sassy and Spunky, but they do not give boys girls' names. These are the names that have the shortest life span as far as zing goes. Soon enough Jordan and Madison are bland. When that happens, one moves to #2 below.

2.When you see people getting inventive with the spellings of popular names, that is a sure sign that that name is on the way down and has lost its pizzazz. People named girls Brittany, but soon had to go with Britni, etc. to have that zing. Paige to Payge. Madison to Madysen. This has gone on for decades (Laurie to Lori, etc.). If names were stock you'd want to sell your shares before this happens. The name is about to become strikingly passe'. I beg you, if you are thinking of naming a girl, do think hard before you give your precious daughter a name with a cute "y" in it in place of a vowel. That is a sign that you have lost confidence in the name.

A good example of the spelling-variation thing as a way to zing up a shopworn popular name: In the late Eighties or so, as I recall college freshmen named Jared became common. Then you got Jarrod, etc. Now nobody, nobody, has that name.

3.No offense, but I think the inventive spellings thing and the poaching of boys' names and surnames for girls' names is often a class thing. If you want your kid to sound like he or she came from a higher social rank, stick with hardy perennials like John and Elizabeth.

It has been a long time since boys were named Adolph for some reason...

Well, growing up with a name like Michael in the 70s and 80s was hardship enough ( five Mikes in a class of twenty-five ).

People are always surprised to find out that I'm male. I am essentially the boy named Sue. But it's not my parents' fault (though I do credit them for the gravel in my guts and the spit in my eye); it's just cultural illiteracy on the march.

Gabriel

I'll echo Alicia's sentiments. I always find it annoying when people burden their kids with funky names or odd spellings. There are plenty of good names to choose from as it is. Please, let's not invent anymore.

As for the Maria thing, interestingly, Spanish first names were slightly in vogue among whites in the early part of the 20th century. Juans and Marias could have surnames like Tripp (former head of Pan Am) as well as Garcia.

Elvendork?

I grew up with an unusual name (Olwen) when all the other girls were named Kathy, Debbie, Nancy, and such. To this day it's a burden; the thought of introducing myself always makes me feel tired.

I forgot - - there are four laws of American nomenclature. This is the fourth one:

In times when Christians feel relatively comfortable with society, they will give their children non-biblical names quite often, or names that are hardly noticeable as biblical names. Look at the names of people of my generation (born 1955). Our parents were worried about international Communism, not American society so much, and so markedly biblical names were not all that common (I'm not counting Mark, John, Deborah, David, etc.).

But in times when Christians feel pretty strongly at odds with society, they will use biblical names for their children more often: Jeremiah, Jedidiah, Naomi, Hannah, etc., or names with a strongly Christian-theological meaning (perhaps not widely known by seculars) like Sophia, Anastasia, etc. (great names, well worthy of revival!).

I'm probably more familiar with Protestant practices than Roman Catholic ones, though.

When I was a kid (the 90s) there were hardly any Zacharys around. It seems that it's becoming slightly more popular in the last few years, though. My brother is Christopher, and my sister is Sara. Fairly boring, I guess.

Since I work in retail, I get to hear all the wonderful names that parents give to their precious snowflakes.
Note to parents: if a name ends in -ayden (Cayden, Hayden, Jayden) do not use it. Also, don't name your daughter Ashlynn, or Jennafir, or Cadence.
Note to black parents: Do you really think your daughter LaBonqeesha or your son Zortavious is going to accomplish much in life?
Put a title in front of a possible name. Congressman _____? Senator _____? Would you vote for someone named that? Then don't use it. At the rate we're going, people of Asian descent will be running the country, because they'll be the only ones with semi-normal names.

Frankly, I'm waiting for the first couple to sell the naming rights to their child. GoldenPalace.com Smith, anyone?

It has been a long time since boys were named Adolph for some reason...

Not entirely disappeared, though. Ever wondered why a certain Latino actor goes by "A Martinez"?

"Benito" also took a big popularity hit for some similar reason after the 1940s, but thanks to the Latino influx it has made a nice comeback since the 80s.

Dumbest "new" name of the 21st century that has become too widespread? Easy: "Nevaeh". I'm just waiting for some joker to give their boy-child the middle name of "Lleh".

BTW, Steve Sailer has an interesting post (when does he not?) about accents and social position. He focuses on how sounding black or Southern is a pretty good predictor that you won't make as much money as those who don't. Money graf:

Whether black or Southern, it's part of the homeboy phenomenon. Using a neutral national accent suggests you are willing to do what it takes to get ahead in this country, while using a subgroup accent suggests you are loyal to the values of your neighborhood and aren't as willing to make sacrifices.

I've written before about how somehow -- no doubt through television -- I absorbed the lesson in childhood that having a distinct Southern accent was a Bad Thing. No kidding, I think it had something to do with Jimmy Carter's presidency, which lasted in the formative years of ages 9 to 13 for me. I unconsciously concluded that sounding like a Southerner indicated incompetence (this, even though I sounded like a Southerner, and everybody around me sounded like a Southerner). At some point, I worked hard to develop a neutral accent as a cultural marker. It was greatly helped by the fact that one of the biggest bullies in my school was a proud ignoramus who spoke with a loud, braying redneck homeboy accent). I was going places. My sister teased me constantly about "sounding fake," and she wasn't wrong. But at some point, that became my accent.

Now, at age 41, I find that I wish I spoke more "Southern" -- but then again, I no longer feel that I have anything to prove in terms of professional advancement, re: being kept down because of the way I speak. Still, there it is. I am reminded, though, when I talk to or with college students how little they appreciate how their language tics (the "Like, OMG" stuff) really will hurt them in an office setting. They'll learn.

Anyway, getting back to the names discussion, I wonder if it ever occurs to people who consider giving their children names like DeMontrae that you never see anybody in positions of authority with those names. Mind you, there are plenty of lower-class Johns and Brians, but very few upwardly mobile DeMontraes. Does the name keep them down, or, following Sailer, is the name the marker of a class that doesn't prize upward mobility and cultivate aspirational values?

Why is it that names that strike the Anglophone ear as at least as weird as DeMontrae -- I'm thinking Indian names, like Vinjay -- carry none of the underclass markers of a DeMontrae? Because people are accustomed of thinking of South Asians as middle-class and aspirational. You see somebody named Vinjay, you immediately think that that kid is going places because he probably comes from a family that expects that of him. DeMontrae? Not so much.

"Another good rule to add to his, which is basically a corollary to his rules, is that any name that has been commonly used as a name for a member of a European royal family is a good name to give to your children. "

So very true. But blast the Carolyns whom we fight all our lives. And even our friends who can't learn the difference in pronunciation.

Another consideration as the aging population increases is which names cute on little girls will sound dignified on an elderly woman.

My siblings and I have such boring white-people names it's almost funny: Allen Thomas, Brandon Quinn, Heather Renee, Lauren Ashley, Julia Ann, Brittany Paige. Incidentally, this almost perfectly mirrors our pre-American roots -- mostly Anglo/Irish, a smidge of French. Two of the girls have an Italian grandfather, but his family was always very "assimilation-oriented" so no conspicuously Italian names.

In my impeccably WASPish ancestry, though, I find "pseudo-ethnic" names like Alonzo, Lafayette, Maria, Isabel and Augusta. In town I knew a mother and daughter named Juanita and Tajuana, neither of whom had the first drop of Latin blood in their veins.

Was this a predominately Southern thing or did it happen elsewhere in the country?

"But was that what folks were thinking when they gave the name to their boys? (Many surnames ending in -er were names of occupations. I believe a fletcher was someone who made arrows, a thatcher thatched roofs, a chandler made candles, etc. Miller, baker, etc. are obvious.)"

As someone from a rural county in Kentucky, I believe many a man carries a surname around as a first name because families used naming opportunities to carry family names forward, and so they piled them onto infants, tho whom the community would confer a nickname anyway. It's not unusual in my part of the country to meet older men with first names such as Chaney, Rowland, Baker, Greene, Westford, etc.

Allen, I'd say you and your siblings, for the most part, have names that became very trendy in the 80s (I'm thinking mainly of Brandon, Heather, Lauren, Ashley, and Brittany....) but which you rarely heard before then... at least not in the South. My family hails from Alabama and North Carolina, and my siblings and cousins (all born in the 60s and 70s) have "classic" names (i.e.biblical and/or English royalty) like Margaret, Elizabeth, Catherine, David, John, William, Robert, etc....) I DO know several Augustas and Isabels in my generation. I think Southerners tended to go with either staunchly 'classic' names or more flamboyant family names (like those I just mentioned) that harkened back to the "Old Country." Another trend among upper middle class Southerners, in that era, was giving children an old family surname as a middle name. (For instance, I'm Margaret Ashton; Ashton was the maiden name of my great grandmother....)

I named my own little girl Amelia, just because I love the name. She's seven, and so far it's serving her well! Of course, that's apropos of nothing.

My newborn daughter's name is Lydia Ruth.

Margaret, you pretty much hit it on the head -- we were all born between 1983 and 1993, 3 of us in NC, 3 in NJ.

"My real name is Ray Oliver Dreher, Jr. -- R.O.D., get it?"

So Rod Dreher is redundant, because the D in Dreher has already be used. You should go with the single name a la Cher, Madonna, Gallagher, etc.

"Here in Dallas, I'm seeing more evidence of boys named Osvaldo (evidence = kid-league soccer stickers on the rear glass of minivans). No Anglo parent in his right mind would stick his son with the bully-bait name "Oswald" -- but the name apparently carries no stigma in its Spanish iteration. "

I'm surprised this name occurs in Spanish, as it's a genuinely Anglo-Saxon name. The only Anglo-Saxon names that survived the Norman Conquest were Edward and Edmund, but there was a fashion for them in the mid to late 19th C, in the USA as well as the UK - Alfred, Edgar, Ethelred, Mildred, Winifred, Hilda, Wilfred, Oswy. I think it was something to do with the Christian Socialist movement. They're all uncommon again now.

Alicia: It would never occur to me that your name would be pronounced other than Ali-si-a, like Alice.

Allen: Why is Isabel exotic?

Isabel isn't "exotic", but like Maria, it's a Latinate variant of a very common English name.

I went to high school with an Osvaldo. He went by Baldo. Puerto Rican family, dad's a doctor, none of the kids spoke a lick of Spanish until they took it in high school. Baldo always seemed to envy his siblings with much more easily Anglicized names.

For what it's worth, here's the trajectory of names on either side of my generation:

My grandparents were Murphy & Lorena (paternal), Burney and Helen (maternal).

My father's name is Ray, and his late brother was Murphy, Jr.. My mother's name is Dorothy; her brother is Burney Jr., and her late sister was Julia.

My sister is Ruth (named after an elderly aunt). I'm Ray, Jr. (my parents nicknamed me Rod).

Ruth's children, all of whom live in the same town, are Hannah, Claire and Rebekah. Mine, who are the first generation to grow up outside of our small Louisiana town, are Matthew, Lucas and Nora.

"My real name is Ray Oliver Dreher, Jr. -- R.O.D., get it? -- and while I was never fond of "Rod," it was better than the other alternatives open to me, or so it seemed to me in elementary school. "Oliver" is kind of a cool name now, but in the 1970s, it was pretty much Oswald."

We think Oliver is a pretty cool name, too. Cool enough that we just gave it to our fifth child. My eldest is a boy (age 11) followed by three sisters; we let him choose between Oliver and Anders for his long awaited brother.

I knew someone who gave their son the middle name RED as R-E-D had been the grandfather and great-grandfather's initials. Fairly clever.

So very true. But blast the Carolyns whom we fight all our lives. And even our friends who can't learn the difference in pronunciation.

Caroline,
Peace. I get just the opposite. Most people I meet assume I'm "Caroline." Always thought it was because Caroline is the more common (or should I say "popular") version of the name. I get bugged when friends who should know better do it, otherwise I just give up and answer to it.

My father's first and middle names: Clarence Columbus. My mother's: Jewel Maxine.

From the names alone, you can almost deduce their period of their relative birth dates: 1914 and 1932.

Certainly there are damn few Clarence's and Maxine's today.

On a related note, I good-naturedly kidded my wife that I wanted to name our third son "Polycarp" after the 2nd century saint. We compromised and settled on "Campion", after the 16th centry English Jesuit martyr.

I'm surprised this name occurs in Spanish, as it's a genuinely Anglo-Saxon name.

It passed into Spanish by way of Visigothic, of which a fair number of names survive in Spanish from use by royalty and aristocrats. Fernando, Alfonso, Armando, Elvira, Reinaldo, Ricardo....

Bubba is a corruption of "brother", usually the result of very small children who can't pronounce "brother" but can (to their ears) approximate the sound. Similar to how "sister" becomes Sissy.

At least, that's how it happened in my family. :)

I think today's workhorse names for girls are the last names of dead presidents: McKinley, Madison,

I've heard a serious argument that the girls name "Madison" derives from the Daryl Hannah character in the 1984 movie Splash. In the movie, a mermaid is trying to pick a human name and happens to look up at a Madison Avenue street sign in Manhattan. Note the chronology of the emergence of the name "Madison" ex nihilo and vaulting into the Top 1,000.

One of my sisters had the hardest time pronouncing my name (the L between two vowels really tripped her up) so until she was about 5, she insisted on simply calling me "Boy".

"I wonder if it ever occurs to people who consider giving their children names like DeMontrae that you never see anybody in positions of authority with those names. Mind you, there are plenty of lower-class Johns and Brians, but very few upwardly mobile DeMontraes."

Or Condoleezas?

I think its quite funny how "old fashioned" and "trendy" names actually switch nowadays. By trying to give their children especially creative and individual names, modern parents actually create trendnames, which become mainstream, and thereby not very individual.

On the contrary, the old fashioned names get rare nowadays, making them special and individual.

Strange world ;-)