Here’s some fun. The US Social Security Administration keeps track of the most popular baby names for boys and girls every year. Now they have them archived, and you can call up any year you want and find out what the most popular names were: ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
For years I’ve been asking my linguistics classes questions like, “How old are the Kaitlins now?” “The Ashleys are finishing high school now, aren’t they?” When I moved home from Europe, I was surprised to get a job and find out that the Jennifers were already grown, working and having children. Now I’m running into lawyers and college professors who are named Megan, which was a little surrealistic for me at first, because I thought only small children had that name. The little Megans – who were born when the Jennifers were teenagers – have grown up. A few years ago, I had trouble with a translation editor, and my first signal that he probably had no experience was that his name was Josh.
Names run in cycles, of course. American baby-boomers liked to give their kids three-syllable names and use all three syllables when talking to them. These kids named Nicholas, Zachary and Christopher have grown up and now tell me they’d prefer to name their kids Tom and Bob.
Interesting post, Jamie! According to that site’s list for my year of birth (1957), my name is number one (well, sort of, because it was Mary) and James is number two! It’s not surprising, since Mary is the most popular girl’s name in many Christian countries. I wonder why there are no Jesuses outside the Spanish speaking world, by the way. I seem to recall that the name is forbidden in Switzerland, for example, as is Napoleon!
Amazing what you can find online. It seems my nickname (Amy) was much less popular the year I was born than when I was in college. But it never made it all the way to the top — only to the number 2 spot. My official ‘passport name’ didn’t make it to the list of the top 1000 at all (!) in quite a few years. :shock: I guess that explains my first-day-at-school discomfort when I was a kid. You know … the first time the teacher takes attendance for the new school year. Naturally they always called out my ‘official name’ instead of ‘Amy’. I used to hate that. What kid wants to have a name that’s “too” unusual? Fortunately, I was always able to “train” each new teacher in time for the second day of school.
Actually its really hard finding a good name that will surely fit to your baby…And usually popular names are common so I prefer to have a unique but meaningful name for my baby…
