The mighty have fallen. The names that ruled over the English-speaking world for centuries have been deposed, and I can prove it with a single chart. Take a look at this past vs. present view of some classic names, 1900 vs. 2018: The 2018 column shows the number of American […]
What happens when your email and social media handles are a little TOO short and memorable?
It was the “huh?” heard ’round the world. For half a day, reports spread that actress Halle Berry had been cast as Ariel in Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. The response was global bafflement. Some was surely directed at Berry’s race (though “outrage” over a black Ariel turned […]
How do you name an archetype? An idealized concept should feel realer than reality, summing up your whole image of a slice of the world. Whatever name you choose, it will reveal a lot about your worldview. That’s certainly the case with the online subculture of “incels” and the two […]
Aa is for Aaron, oo is for Cooper, ee is for Lee. Traditionally, that’s as far as doubled vowels go. The letters u and i just don’t double up in American English, in words or in names. At least, they didn’t. In this, generation, ii names have taken hold. The […]
Antique boys’ names can be an elusive target. Past generations of parents just didn’t leave us much to draw on. While girls’ names swung in and out of fashion, the same boys’ classics—John, William, James—dominated decade after decade. If a name never falls out of popularity, it can’t develop vintage […]
Your name has enemies. Don’t blame yourself, it’s nothing that you did. In fact, your name itself is perfectly innocent. But somewhere out there, there’s another name holding a grudge. I learned this from a Twitter conversation started by a Jonah who declared Jonas his name’s natural enemy. When he […]
How deep do you have to dig for a boy’s name that still sounds Scottish to American ears? US parents have already mined Scottish name traditions for generations of hits, from Ronald to Bruce to Cameron. Can there be any fresh, stylish and distinctly Scottish names still left to discover? […]
Amazon put us on a collision course. Not that we couldn’t see it coming—Apple’s Siri had sent early-warning signals years before. With Amazon’s “virtual assistant” Alexa, though, there was no escape. Human names and virtual names met head on, and the human names blinked. Alexa was America’s fastest-falling baby name […]
In my teenage daughters’ generation, American girls named Madison outnumber Bridgets by nearly 20 to 1. Yet my kids have had plenty of classmates named Bridget, and they’ve never met a Madison. A statistical fluke? In part, yes, but the odds were stacked by geography. We live in Massachusetts. This […]
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