Slate had a great series on baby names earlier that I've been meaning to link to for some time.
Here's the article about how people try and trade up when naming their kids. Names like Amber and Heather, enormously popular in with high-income parents in, say, 1980, have worked their way down the socio-economic ladder and are now considered low-income names. (No social judgment from me, I'm just interested in the sociology there.)
Here's the list of top ten names for white baby girls in 1980 and then again in 2000. Sarah stayed popular, but names like Jennnifer and Michelle bit the dust to be replaced with names that used to be considered grandma names -- Hannah and Emma, for example (and the ubiquitous Madison).
This list has the top 20 whitest girl names and the top 20 blackest girls names. My niece Molly apparently has the whitest of white-girl names. Neither list shows great originality -- the white-girl list has four versions of "Caitlin," the black-girl list has four versions of "Jasmine."
Here's their list of baby names that might be popular in 2015, if trends continue. Oh little Finnegan, Flannery, stop that! I actually like quite a few of these names, though I recognize they can sound quite pretentious, but the worst two have got to be Clementine ("and her shoooooes were number niiiiine") and Keyon ("Hey, don't put that Key On the table!"). Also, if you have twins, you could name them Reagan and Carter and they could have heated political debates over their Cheerios.
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9 comments:
Heh. I know a bunch of people off the 2015 list already, but very few off the others!
Neither of these names are on the list, but working with elementary & middle school yearbooks (as I do), I have come up with two all-time favorite names.
Seaborn Algee (boy)
Beneatha Lake (girl)
really.
Have I mentioned that I think people hate their children and want them to suffer?
I just wanted to say that the book the Salon article is about is fantastic. Freakonomics makes some incredibly interesting points about...well, about a lot of things, including the name of children.
Since you mentioned Madisons -- Am I mistaken, or did Madison come from the movie "Splash"? I never heard it before that film. Then there was he scene where she was trying to pick an English name, and they ended up on Madison Avenue, and she liked the word. I remember Tom Hanks' character laughing that "Madison" is not a name...
Are all these people named after a Daryl Hannah character?
parents should really buck the Madison "trend" and replace it with Pris...this made me think of one of the funniest things I've read on PCJM, "Baby's Named a Bad Bad Thing" http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/
OMG, Quinn, no!!! Don't let her name become so popular that it's on a list! (running, fleeing, hiding...)
i am curious, how old is the yearbook with the name seaborn in it?
I think this is very interesting, espcally the names for 2015. I am 15 now, and my name is Linden, but i know no one with that name. (Expect, like, Lyndon, the former persident...) Well, i actually used this page in an artice i'm doing and it was very helpful. Thank you,
Linden
We named our first daughter, Flannery, for Flannery O'Connor, the author. She is 24 years old. Our first son, now 28, is named Justin. When we named him Justin, for Justin Martyr, he was the only Justin we knew. When he got to kindergarten, there were four classes, and each one had a Justin. How depressing! We had hoped to name him something that was not "common." We also have a Graham, Meredith and a Patrick (not Pat).
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