Calling Children Names

Two little girls that play at one of the playgrounds near me are Madison and Lexington.

Actually, Madison is not a name after a place. It’s one of the most common names for new female babies in the US right now, and easily the number one name for the female children of yuppies who jog, and own Jettas and Golden Retreivers.

Hoo-boy. This is a can of worms – one of my favorites. It has long been a source of innocent amusement to me to wonder aloud ‘Why Chelsea? Huh? If Chelsea, why not Brixton? Kilburn? Clapham? Muswell Hill?’

And then there are the Tiffanys. Tiffany indeed. Why not Bloomingdales then? Or Baccarat? Why not just name the kid ‘Expensive Shop’ and be done with it?

That would be Picabo Street.

BTW someone named “Ophelia” is in no position to snigger.

Well, to be sure, and the fact is I’m not keen on my name. But come on – Peekaboo. And I’m not sniggering, I’m expressing disgust. Well, plus a modicum of sniggering.

check ’em out here.

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

Madison = 2nd most popular female name for 2002. (Emily was first)

And of course, not to forget Paris Hilton.

One of the fun things about that social security administration names site is that you can chart the rise and fall of various names. Turns out Madison was a mere #133 in 1990, but it’s been climbing the charts since then, cracking the top ten in 1997 and never looking back. I’m not yet 30 and never met anyone named Madison in school, extending from grade school all the way through the college students I teach today. I expect the first one should be along shortly.

Also, not that misspelling the names of female children by replacing vowels with y’s at random seems to be a popular trend amongst parents these days. Add to the swelling ranks of Madisons over 600 each of ‘Madyson’ and ‘Madisyn.’

Comparing the list of popular names for boys and girls, it becomes clear that parents are taking a great deal more care to give boys names that will be taken seriously, and girls names that are, to be charitable, intended to be cute. To be uncharitable, that sound like porn stars: the girls top 100 includes Jada, Autumn, Trinity, Sierra, Savannah, and Destiny.

No offense intended to people who gave these names to their children. Or have these names.

When my sister wsa born, we thought a lot about names, and argued incessantly. She’s much younger than my sister or me, and we had no friends with young kids. So we had no idea what names were popular. Eventually we agreed on Alexandra. She was among 4 Alexandras and 2 or 3 Alexanders in her nursery school alone. (The Alexanders used different nicknames, while the Alexandras just were called by their last names. It was very cute.)

A professor of mine had her two kids while living in the US, but named them French names. When she and her husband went back to France for two years, guess what two names turned out to be popular at just her kids’ ages?

There’s some weird thing about names, and how suddenly one of them will take hold of the psyche of all new parents.

On another note, I hate the trend of giving girls idiotic names. (I do mean to insult people who do this, but not the kids, who had no choice.) My neighbour’s daughter is named Allyn. No one would call their son Jennifor.

An excellent leisure activity is to try to figure out which surnames of U.S. presidents are suitable to become the popular baby girls’ names of the future. It seems obvious, for instance, that “McKinley,” not currently in the top 1000, will be picked up soon. Ditto “Jackson,” right now #53 (and climbing) for boys, so probably a good 10-20 years away from picking up steam as a girl name. “Reagan,” in case you didn’t know, has climbed from 998 in 1990 to 201 today.

On the other hand, I can’t see naming my daughter “Taft,” “Coolidge,” or “Bush.”

A surge of patriotism in the maternity ward–check out “Liberty,” bursting into the top 1000 in 2001.

“Comparing the list of popular names for boys and girls, it becomes clear that parents are taking a great deal more care to give boys names that will be taken seriously, and girls names that are, to be charitable, intended to be cute. To be uncharitable, that sound like porn stars: the girls top 100 includes Jada, Autumn, Trinity, Sierra, Savannah, and Destiny.”

This is what I’m saying. I almost did say – then decided not to because it would be so plodding and dull, but really – who would ever name a boy ‘Peekaboo’??

And people wonder why women get cranky sometimes.

I have a two-year old son named Henry and am pleased to see some old fashioned names like his, and Max, come back. However, ther are some truly awful ones out there, mostly for girls. For boys you have the trendy Tyler, Austin, Aidan, for girls, Madison is the most bizarre. At least with most made-up girls names they tend to sound cute. There is nothing cute about calling a girl Madison. If you like Maddy, then call her Madeline.

I was actually named after the actress who played the Bionic Woman in the 1970s, Lindsay Wagner. Also, my brother’s name is Clinton, but he was born in 1982. He’s been suffering since 1992.

I strongly suspect that the name Tiffany predates the establishment of Tiffany’s the jewelry store.

I wouldn’t mind naming my daughter Reagan. It’s a nice name. There was an article in the NYTimes awhile ago about the bizarre names people were giving their kids. Madison was brought up and they traced it to the movie Splash. That movie must have made a real impact on the American psyche. Snort.

Turns out Picabo Street is also named after a town:

“Stubby and Dee Street are the ’60s hippie parents who make the story so unique. At birth, they named their daughter ”Little Girl” because they wanted their children to eventually pick their own names. A trip to Mexico ended that whim, with customs officials fearing trouble if ”Little Girl” ever got lost. Given two weeks to rename her, Stubby thought of a town named Picabo, which is Indian for ”shining waters.” Picabo Street was born, a name she loved too much to ever change, even when boys teased her in school.”

With all the talk of silly names for girls and gratuitous y’s, this thread is crying out for a link to Baby’s Named a Bad, Bad Thing.

Ya think the name Tiffany predated the store? As a first name? Why, just a hunch? The store is no spring chicken, and I sure don’t recall ever seeing the name Tiffany in any oldish novels or diaries or similar.

My friend didn’t think that “Ebola” really was such a cute girl’s name after all, but she thanked me for the suggestion.

Picabo Street is really funny and spunky, and the name fits her.

Bridger is a big name in the pioneer history of the U.S. West, and that’s probably where the kid’s name came from.

I did a survey of boys’ and girls’ names 1900–1999 based on the World Almanac. This gist is that until ~1960 boys’ names were stable and stodgy, whereas the girls’ names changed much more rapidly. Since 1960 boys’ names have been catching up, and since about 1980 the top ten girls’ names have almost all changed every ten years. It’s posted at my URL, and in 1999 Madison was #2.

Ah, thanks for the Tiffany info. I was wrong. There were medieval Tiffanys running around – whaddya know.

A friend of mine (surname: Palmer) always insisted he wanted to call his firt born son “Fridge” because he just thought (for euphonic reasons) that ‘Fridge Palmer’ sounded so cool [no pun intended] … I agree, it does sound kind of cool. But the poor kid would either grow up to be the hardest kid in school (on the ‘Boy named Sue’ theory) or spend his life a victimized wreck.

A school friend of mine went on to a trendy progressive private school when we were about 11 – the sort of place where they write with crayons until the age of 14 [to prevent an anal fixation with neatness], and where gardening and rhythmic movement take equal place in the curriculum with physics and English etc. – and he had a school mate, called, and I kid not, Cloudberry …

I also know a girl from Glasgow called ‘Demi’ – although she’s 4 or 5 years too old to be named after the actress.

{On an entirely different note, I’m jealous of Slavic dimunitives. My wife is eastern european and has about 15 different cool dimunitive forms of her rather ordinary – for where she’s from – name. Some of them are postively Bond-villainess-esque}

Some names are difficult to pronounce with a straight face when they occur among one’s students. “Angina” was a bit of a challenge, for example, as was “Arsema.”

And what’s with all these male names that become female names, like Leslie and Ashley?

The sociologist Stanley Lieberson has written quite a bit on names, much of which is relevant to this discussion.

I know a child named Cheyenne Jade. Poor baby.

There’s a joke about a pair of female twins called Ima and Uma Pigg. They’re real people, I’ve been told. THere’s also the one about the boy whose parents named him Shithead. Pronounce it Shi-theed. Everyone always swears that they’re real. I have my doubts.

I went to high school with a girl named Shaneequa and another girl named Chiquita. Why do people do these things to their kids?

I’m in love with the British name Alastair. Alastair and Liam are bootiful. Yes, bootiful.

“What ever happened to the good solid names, like Bertha or Gertrude?”

Or Ermintrude and Kunigunde?

(Full disclosure: My given name is Jessica. I have no children. The cats are named Valentine and Autumn Ecclesiastes, but they’re cats and can’t complain about their stupid names.)

The worst I’ve ever seen was when I was in highschool — I went to school with a girl named Thumbelina.

And, if Chris B weren’t off on a trip, he could tell us about the fate of the girl who was named after the entire 1979 Liverpool football team (both first and last names of the entire squad, if I remember right, though I may have the year wrong).

There is a very popular guide to giving babies trendy names which (when originally published in the mid 1980’s) was “Beyond Jennifer and Jason”. It was updated in the 1990’s to “Beyond Jennifer and Jason, Madison and Montana”. Among other suggestions it had was to come up with more unusual flower names for girls, including Jonquil. It also suggested seemingly random word names, such as Axiom and Quintessence.

I will note that I knew someone in high school (born in 1963) whose parents tried to name him after the character in the Three Musketeers, but did not know how to spell it. His birth certificate read Dartanyan.

My daughter (Beatrice, since the topic is names) went to day care with a little boy named Matrix. He would have been born just too early to be named for the movie, so at least the parents are off the hook for that, but Matrix is so clearly a girl’s name.

I like the girl’s name Alexia – even after I learned it’s also the name of a brain disorder. ROFL

I first heard of the name while playing Resident Evil: Code Veronica.

Re: Tiffany

Recall that in the movie Goldfinger, Bond meets the lovely Tiffany Case. Asked about her (then-unusual) name, she explained that her mother went into labor in the store. Sean Connery mutters “Good thing it wasn’t Van Cleef and Arpels”

Re: silly student names, I know a teacher who had more than one young girl named “Latrine” pronounced “La-TREEN-uh” like Katrina.

But how do people decide which word is going to be a boy’s name and which a girl’s? When the football (soccer) player David Beckham saddled his son with Brooklyn (place of conception, apparently), they got a woman on the radio saying, “They can’t do that, Brooklyn is a girls’name!”

How did she KNOW?

Linden, I’ve never met anybody named Brook and Insh’allah I never will. I used to know a bloke called Lyn (short for Emlyn)fairly well.

Have you ever seen a bridge called Annemarie?

My wife says that if a girl’s name sounds silly if inserted in this sentence:

“The Honorable Chief Justice {Your Daughter’s Name Here} and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable Supreme Court of the United States are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”

… DONT USE IT!

What the shizzle is up with a guy who calls himself “Nelly”?

It’s short for “Cornell”.

Have you ever met a boy named Brook…?

Brook Jacoby, Cleveland Indians third baseman in the ’80s.

If you want to talk about clusters, there’s one of girls born in 1985-86 with some variant of the name “Hailey”.

I have long suspected that the CIA conducts exercises in mind-control through various media and that embedded in these subliminal messages are particular children’s names–and the the purpose of the Social Security Administration’s detailed tracking of names is to provide simple feedback on the efficacy of these messages; that is the higher the rank, the more dominant that message.

Or maybe not.