On Naming Trends

Is there anything more fascinating than naming trends? What on earth makes people up and decide that they are going to start naming children Braden and Madison and London and Neveah?

That last one is "heaven" backwards, if you didn't catch that. It was one of the top 1000 most popular names for girls in 2006. Which I know because I frequent the Social Security names database, which is SERIOUS fun.

But not quite as fun as The Baby Name Wizard Name Voyager, which lets you look at a graph that changes baby name trends over time. So you can see the spectacular fall of names like Walter, and the spectacular rise of names like Kaylee, and the spectacular rise and fall of names like Erin.

I mean, this IS fun, right? Fun if you are me.

The name Madison for girls, which is currently the third most popular name in the country, seems to have been created by the 1984 romantic comedy "Splash." After the movie's release, the name Madison started climbing the charts. It was virtually unheard of before. Did you know this? (Apparently this same story is related in the book Freakanomics, which I've not read.)

In that movie, the main character, a mermaid played by Darryl Hannah, names herself after the Manhattan street she is on: Madison Avenue. Tom Hanks' character makes some joke right afterwards like, good thing we weren't on 39th Street, or something like that.

Yeah, funny, okay ... but seriously. The screenwriters really might have placed her on another street, given her a different name! What if she was on Mott Street, and called herself Mottie? Would that be a top-ten name now? Okay, that's hard to imagine. But what if she'd named herself Mulberry, Macdougal or Park? Or if she'd named herself Manhattan or Brooklyn? Would those be the third most popular names in the country today, and Madison virtually unknown?

Or maybe it wasn't the character in the movie that did it. Maybe it was the name Madison itself, something slightly feminine sounding (connoting Madeleine), with certain high-class associations, and yet slightly offbeat. Maybe the movie just served as the jumping off point.

Either way, Madison was a name that nobody ever heard of thirty years ago. Now it's more common than Mary or John in elementary schools.

There tends to be this tendency to assume that it is only recently that people started making up names for their children. That names before had been unchanging and constant. That it's only been lately that people saddled their children with monikers like MaKayLa and what have you. But this overlooks the fact that it was once acceptable to name children Epaphroditus or Birdadorothea or Hezekiah. That people would name children after any old favorite author or friend or virtue.

In my research lately, I came across an 18th century woman named Experience. I mean, come on. That was probably a bad name even at the time. Not only do opportunities for off-color jokes abound, but what the fuck was her nickname? Expie?

That said, it is the case that Rosalind Little tends to gravitate to the nineteenth-century names. She is not especially drawn to johnny-come-lately names like Brianna and Logan. They seem like suburban cookie-cutter names to her. She prefers Emma, Jacob, Hannah, Olivia and Andrew. They seem weightier, more substantial.

Yet she is not alone, as those are all top-ten names for 2006. My taste in names might seem individual to me, but it's really part of some national trend. Who understands broad subtle cultural change like this? Not me, folks.

So for my husband and me, the quest in naming a daughter became about finding a name that had roots, history and tradition, but finding one that other people weren't using in droves. We were drawn to lovely names that had been forgotten in recent years. The nursing home names. Ruby and Nora and Stella and Alice. And Lucy, which is what we named our dear girl.

A good compromise, right? And yet in doing this, in looking for possible names, we were told by baby naming books that we fell into another trend: "antique revival names." We shared this in common with other urban and college-educated types. So how unique is it possible to be? Individual taste is a myth. You can't escape the impact of culture.