August 10th, 2012
Galley Friend Gabriel Rossman has a really interesting statistical look at baby names that goes deeper than the typical Baby Name Voyager search:
I was inspired to play with this data by two things in conversation. The one I’ll discuss today is somebody repeated a story about a girl named “Lah-d,” which is pronounced “La dash da” since “the dash is not silent.”
This appears to be a slight variation on an existing apocryphal story, but it reflects three real social facts that are well documented in the name literature. First, black girls have the most eclectic names of any demographic group, with a high premium put on on creativity and about 30% having unique names. Second, even when their names are unique coinages they still follow systematic rules, as with the characteristic prefix “La” and consonant pair “sh.”
Not coincidentally, Rossman’s book, Climbing the Charts (a statistical look at how pop songs perform on the charts) is out and worth your valuable time.
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Seen in a 7-11 some months ago. The clerk’s name on his shirt: Dug.
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Oh, man, right up there with MBTI and the NBA draft, this is one of my biggest, nerdiest interests. The blog that’s attached to the Name Voyager is a fountain of supremely interesting sociological data, and for all of the following I credit Wattenberg. To that end, three things:
A. Punctuation of names is already all over the place on the creative spellings side of things. http://bit.ly/O9u8CP
B. Creativity is really branching out. There’s a pretty sharp regional divide in naming trends, best captured in the Northeast (traditional) vs. the…Mountain West (Biblical and creative names lead); as you could probably guess, there’s an education-level and age difference between your average suburban Boston and suburban Salt Lake City mother. And in the latter category, you’re seeing a lot of names constructed out of different, trendy syllables (Baylee, Kyleigh, Braeden, etc.). One of the interesting aspects of this is that, despite the endless variation of spellings, the names have actually become more similar. Where Richard and Thomas and Margaret have very distinct sounds, Hayden, Mason, Bryson, Jaxon, Landon, Aiden blend together — names sound much more similar in the pursuit for uniqueness (-n has become the extremely dominant ending to most boys’ names http://bit.ly/O9w5Pz). There was just a post about names that have become popular by appearing Biblical, rather than actually being Biblical (http://bit.ly/MBYdrG).
C. A friend of mine is a teacher in Louisiana in a less than affluent area; there is an extreme amount of creativity. Last year, though, when she was noting off some of the names in the class, I made the point to her that in this decade, while L’Dysia might not be a widely popular name, it’s more normal to be named D’Angelo or Aja than Martha.
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Rossman’s book on FM radio is kind of academic in the main text, but his endnotes are a blast. Somebody should sign him up for an Airport Book now that Jonah Lehrer is hobbled.
Nedward August 10, 2012 at 2:32 pm
When affluent white Krystal Ball was trying to run for Congress last time the blogger brain trust went into full blue-haired biddy mode to blast her “stripper name” lest they be accused of cheap jeering only at uncouth poor people. These are the same eagle-eyed propriety experts tallying up all the black names like “Leeza Gibbons” and “Marcus Welby”