What a lovely way of saying what you’re thinking of me

This has a bit of late Roman Empire feel if you ask me:

How can you be sure the name you choose for your child is good in the first place? There are experts for that. “If you look at the most popular baby names, it’s such a telltale sign of our cultural values and our aspirations,” Taylor A. Humphrey, a professional baby namer, said the other day. She was wearing an emerald floral dress; beside her was her Havanese, named Willa (ranked No. 349 in 2020, for humans).

Last year, she helped name more than a hundred kids. Indecisive parents can choose from Humphrey’s services, which start at fifteen hundred dollars and range from a phone call and a bespoke name list (based on parents’ answers to a questionnaire) to a genealogical investigation, with the aim of ferreting out old family names. A ten-thousand-dollar option involves selecting a name that will be on-brand with a parent’s business. Some also hire Humphrey as a doula.

Somebody is making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just from naming other peoples’ children.

What a country.

The mother of a three-month-old named Isla called in a panic, contemplating a name change after people kept pronouncing the silent “s.” Humphrey advised her to stay the course; Isla is a top-one-hundred name. Another common issue? Too many kids. “I have a lot of families for whom this is their third or fourth kid, and they’re, like, ‘We’re out of names,’ ” she said.

To find names, she mines film credits, observes street signs, and studies trends. One good source is the Social Security database, which reveals the quick decline of disaster names (Katrina, Isis) and names taken over by brands. “I don’t think Delta is going to be out for a long time,” she said. “Unlike Siri and Alexa.”

She connects the popularity, ten years ago, of four-letter names (Ruby, Luna, Levi) with the rise of such instant-gratification apps as Seamless and Tinder. Now longer names are making a comeback—the result, Humphrey believes, of the lockdown-related return to leisurely pursuits like gardening, cooking, and crafting. Waiting for the sourdough to rise has given people the patience to enunciate multisyllable names like Genevieve, Josephine, and Theodore.

On the phone, Humphrey and her client were working through the list. A pass on Stellan caused Humphrey to pause. “Stellan is a great alternative to Soren. I think of shooting stars,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn’t rush past that one. It means ‘peaceful and calm.’ ”

“It sounds a lot like Stalin,” the client said. “I’m a huge World War Two buff.”

Humphrey dropped it and moved on. 

You can have lots of fun with the Social Security names data base, which will give you the popularity of names in rank order in any year going back to the 1880s. An interesting feature of naming patterns is that girls’ names from two generations ago are invariably unpopular at present, because they’re associated with old women. Hence the top ten girl names of the 1930s:

Mary

Betty

Barbara

Shirley

Patricia

Dorothy

Joan

Margaret

Nancy

Helen

Rank order for these names in 2021: Mary, 124th, Betty, not in the top 1000, Barbara, 899th, Shirley, not in the top 1000, Patricia, not in the top 1000, Dorothy, 524th, Joan, not in the top 1000 (how is that possible?), Margaret, 126th, Nancy, 893rd, Helen, 424th.

The same thing doesn’t hold at all for boys’ names from the 1930s:

Robert

James

John

William

Richard

Charles

Donald

George

Thomas

Joseph

Robert, 80th, James, 6th, John, 27th, William, 5th, Richard, 208th, Charles, 46th, Donald, 610th (no MAGA effect interestingly), George, 133rd, Thomas, 45th, Joseph, 26th.

You can tell a young person’s class status with about .71 accuracy just from their name. That’s why Connor and Maddie need to go to a good school after all.

Have fun with the databases.

. . . Andrew Gelman has some cool graphs.