Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
"Sumana" Hasn't Yet Cracked The US Top Thousand
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2005 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
The Baby Name Wizard is a neat site about baby names. If you can view Java stuff in your browser, look at the Baby Name Wizard Name Voyager, which shows you the relative popularity of names in the US in the twentieth century (as long as the names were in the top thousand). Some observations:
People are naming their kids "Genesis". Should this be a boy name or a girl name? How about "Jaeden"? Evidently "Jaeden" is male, while Leonard opines that "Jaeden" "is a name for a Trill." There were quite a few "Deanna"s in the '80s and '90s.
People are naming their sons "Xander" and "Logan". People are naming their daughters and sons "Diamond". (There used to be men named "Pearl" but women have pretty effectively claimed that ground for our own. "Loren" also used to be male and is now female.)
"Rosemary" is sort of down but "Sage" is way up.
"Otis" has been slowly declining for a century.
"Grace" and "Hope" are more popular, which is too bad because I used to like them. Now I won't want to use them if I have kids, and I'll associate them with mewling brats.
"Thalia"??? "Thyra"????
"Porter" and "Portia" have alternated in popularity.
"Scott", "Pearl", "Erin", "Carlton", and "Petra" are out of fashion. "Fern" and "Florence" are nice and unpopular. "Basil", "Douglas", and "Dorothy" are down. "Lois" is on the wane.
"Horace", "Hortense", and "Columbus" have dropped out of the top thousand. Leonard and I both like "Horace" - maybe it's the connection to the old-school writer. There were a bunch of "Cicero"s 100 years ago. "Homer" dive-bombed in the '80s; "Virgil" died later. There were a lot more female "Vergie"s than male "Vergil"s.
I noticed that there are a lot more Josefs than there used to be. Leonard decided that this is "because Stalin is hot, hot, hot."
I noticed that people are naming their kids "Chasity" [sic]. Leonard: "They are naming their kids that to get around spam filters."
Awww, no one is naming their little boy "Columbus" anymore.
Who named their kids "Buddy" en masse in the '30s? We think of "Buddy" as a nickname but back then it was a real name.
There is a big spike of "Kobe"s and "Shaquille"s recently.
MAGNUS! RODERICK! STANLEY!
