I do think the best names are ones with the most meaning.
You name a kid Isaac, you could be naming him after Isaac Newton. It puts something on to him.
If you name a kid William, maybe you hope he will be the next Shakespeare.
Simply by naming someone something, you imprint something on to them. The history and power of a culture.
Yet for this very reason, especially when people see the culture as dark, they choose unique names, names that say you can be who you want to be.
Though I think I still prefer old names, looking at names of people who have done something, and then hoping to do something similar.
I think this is kind of why a convert to an orthodox Christianity, from some heterodoxy, or atheism, or from the religion of the “infadels” takes a new name in baptism. They hope to live up to whomever. If you take the name Theresa at baptism with a sense of obligation to love the lowly like Mother Theresa and so on.
I named my kid Dexter. Despite my best efforts he won't wear lab coats or speak with an accent. When I try he just asks me to go buy some plastic drop cloths and goes back to sharpening the kitchen knives.
> You name a kid Isaac, you could be naming him after Isaac Newton. It puts something on to him.
My son's name. I was thinking of Isaac Asimov and I had Isaac Newton in mind as well. I know an SF writer who I worked with who named his sons Arthur and Robert, after famous SF writers obviously in his case.
>LEVITT: Yeah, one of the most predictable patterns when it comes to names is that almost every name that becomes popular starts out as a high-class name or a high-education name. So in these California data we had we could see the education level of the parents. And even the names that eventually become the, quote, “trashiest” kinds of names, so the Tiffanys and the Brittanys, and I’ll probably get myself in trouble, and the Caitlyns and things like that start at the top of the income distribution, and over the course of 20 or 30 or 40 years they migrate their way down, becoming more and more popular among the less-educated set.
What you see with Mabel in the paper is a fad name coming back. Hipsters bring it back, then upper class parents with hipster pretentions popularize it, then it spreads to the general population. The trick is to pick a name that sounds outdated or obscure but will come into popularity within the child's lifetime. If you wanted to do that now, you would pick something like Linda or Iris.
I would also be interested to see analysis on syllable counts. When will the boomer 2 syllable names will come back into style?
I worked with a Harrison (born in the 70s) who commented that the name had a bathtub curve - most people with the name were either really old or really young (he knew more Harrisons in his toddler's preschool class than his own age).
Compare with a name like Michael ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Michael ), which while it has fallen out of favor with newer names, is still the most common male name in the population - though the average age is 48 years.
My first thought is that children born in the 70s named "Harrison" owe their names to Harrison Ford, at that time wildly popular for Star Wars and Indiana Jones. "Mabel" may owe some popularity thanks to Selena Gomez's character in "Only Murders In The Building."
One of the things to take note of between those two charts is that the most popular names are less popular. Parents are choosing distinctive names rather than common names.
In 1970, the top five male names represent 2.5 million births. Michael (the most common name) was 707,377 of them.
In 2010, the most common name was Noah with 183,258 births. In 1970, a name with that much popularity would be #20.5 between Thomas and Timmothy.
That 2.5 million again... in 2010s that's 19 names.
... Another visualization of the data. https://namerology.com/baby-name-grapher/ This looks at the top 200 names for boys and girls over time. However, the downward slope isn't fewer overall births but rather the reduction of popularity of the most common names.
I've always found it somewhat amusing that, at least for my age range, I have a given name that's not unique or obviously weird but pretty uncommon. At the last place I worked, that was guaranteed to--on the odd conference call--have one of the two of us sharing a given name periodically be "Why the hell is someone asking me about $THING_I_KNOW_NOTHING_ABOUT ?" While both my first and last names are northern European, they are also from different countries so as far as I know I'm unique among living people with an Internet presence which is presumably better than sharing a name with someone who is widely hated for some reason or other.
