baby name

[flea]

Born to Alicia (of my old LLL group), Tessa Brielle. Big sister is Cadence.

I generally don't editorialize, but I hate the name Cadence, love Tessa, and hate Brielle. Usually it's not so mixy from one person - either I like their taste overall, or don't.

One thing I ponder about baby names is to what extent trendiness/date-stamping runs in families. It's why I sometimes note the names of the parents. For example, my cousin is named Jeff, b. 1972. His wife is Denise, about the same age. To me, both of those are very 1970s names. Jeffrey actually peaked at #9 in 1966, and is now at #190. Denise peaked at #25 in 1964, and is now #370. Their kids: Alyssa, b. 2002 (#12) and and Ashlyn, b. 2005 (#126, and at its peak that year; it's dropped since).

My mother chose non-trendy names, unusual but classic. Me: not in top 100 in the year I was born (broke 900 in 1990 and is still rising). Sister: #300 in the year she was born, down from a peak of #35 in 1946, and still falling. Brother: #94, in the middle of a slowly rising trend - it hit 61 in 2000-2001. All of our names are actually family names, but of course style influences which family names one chooses. (We were not going to name our kids after Great-aunt Edna or Grandpa Eugene.)

Interestingly, my mother is Deborah (#15, 1949), her sisters are Susan (#8, 1947) and Elizabeth (#22, 1957). So a person from a "trendy" name family can choose to deviate. Whereas her sister Susan (Jeff's mother) stayed trendy - her other son (b. 1977) is Gregory (#35).

Comments

[larisa57.livejournal.com]

My sister's name is extremely popular -- most popular girls name not only for the year she was born, but for several years before and after. My mom actually decide over a decade earlier that that's what she was going to name her first daughter. My name has never been very popular, but I think that I remember checking the charts and it reached its top popularity a few years after I was born, but still way down toward the bottom of the chart. And I have the less-popular spelling of it, too.

My mother and her sister both have names that were pretty popular in the late forties. My dad's name was also popular for his birth year, though he got it kind of interestingly -- my grandfather came to the US from Austria in 1944, and went to movies a lot to try to listen and learn better English. There was one movie that had either a character or an actor (he couldn't remember which, later on) with a name that seemed to him like just such a perfect American name, that he decide that that's the name he would give to his first American-born son. So, a Viennese interpretation of Americanness, and the name is actually the sort that you'd encounter in King Arthur and similar time period stuff.

[brendalu.livejournal.com]

My sister's name is the same as yours (though she's one l and I think you have two?). At the time, certainly not very known. But I have to think it's seen an upswing in the last twenty years. Hmm.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I distinctly remember at 13-14 knowing that my favorite names where Sophie and Eleanor, and if I had children I would name them those names.

I was 13 in 1985. Sophia's popularity then? #236. When I had a daughter? #20. Eleanor 1985: 670; 2003: 308 (and that belies the popularity of Ellie-names, which derive from various full names.)