I've been doing data entry on all our new students. It's a boring sort of job, but it does keep me up to date on naming trends in America; we tend to be faddish about this. I grew up in a generation of girls named Mary, Margaret, Katherine, Elizabeth, and Jane. This was followed by the Linda/Marilyn/Karen/Barbara generation, then the Cheryl/Kimberly generation, and now the Jennifer/Heather/Michelle generation.
Guys' names have been somewhat more stable over this time period. There are fewer Franks and Georges and Charles's than there used to be, and there are a lot more Jasons and Seans and Todds, but on the whole, men's names just haven't changed all that much. Not surprising, I suppose. After all, during this time period, women went from wearing poodle skirts to pleated skirts, miniskirts, maxis, pantsuits, mod, and God knows what all else, while men just kept right on wearing jeans, suits and ties. Men just aren't much moved by the winds of fashion.
I've been interested in names for a long time, and have had great opportunities to study them; one of the jobs in my checkered career was reading obituaries for the University of Iowa Libraries (they wanted to know if any prominent Iowan had died whose papers they might want to acquire--ghoulish, no?). And one of the things that has appalled me is the number of parents who can't resist the opportunity to give their kid a joke for a name--Candy Kane, and the like.
I am surprised that more parents are not murdered by their children.
So many people don't understand that names are magic. They help to create a child's sense of self. To give a child a joke name is to tell her that she is not of consequence. I think of the Lear family in my home town, who named their daughter Crystal Shanda. (At least a girl can marry out of her name. Had they named an unfortunate son King, he would have been stuck with it.)
In America, girls tend to get stuck with endearing little girl names, with cutesy spellings, often ending with the diminutive "i" or "y", which is why virtually every boy's name ending with this sound has been appropriated for females--Sydney is now almost exclusively a female name. Cutesy names do not invite people to take these women seriously.
Now, I'm a big fan of Bob Geldof. I loved the Boomtown Rats, I enjoyed "Vegetarians of Love," and, of course, I think the work that he did with Live Aid, and his subsequent work in Africa, was admirable. But the genuinely humanitarian work he did does not excuse him for naming his innocent daughter Fifi Trixibelle. This is a child whose apparent career options include stripper, showgirl, or slut.
All names have cultural meaning embedded in them. To me, "Mary", for instance, is associated with words like "sweet," "patient," helpful, "uncomplaining," "doormat"...
I don't answer to Mary. Not that anybody understands Marylaine (legally, MaryElaine, but nobody except the Internal Revenue Service is allowed to call me that). I have to answer, the first time around, to Marilyn, MaryEllen, MaryJane, MaryAnn, etc. But because there are no other Marylaine's around, it means that I get to define the cultural meaning of my name, which is wonderfully liberating.
As for boys' names, we Americans are kind of intolerant. Most of our boys' names get cut off short--Jim, Bill, Bob, Matt; the closer it comes to a pure grunt, the more masculine it is.
So nonstandard names for boys come freighted with the cultural message of "wimp." To name a boy "Howard" in America is to create either a "Howard" personality or a resolutely "anti-Howard" personality, a wuss or a jock, a mama's boy or a hell's angel.
If you look at the rosters of the National Football League, you will find a striking number of men with gender-ambiguous names, like Lynn, Leslie, Lee, Sydney. These are men who were almost certainly forced into toughness, men who would have had to fight for their lives in elementary school against the bullies who regarded these names as an invitation to violence. (I do appreciate that the English are a lot more civilized about this sort of thing; I believe your Adrians and Alastairs are probably allowed to grow up in peace.)
Because names matter, I thought long and hard about what to name my child. I wanted a name that had no inbuilt personality attached, or at least had a wide variety of possible personalities. (At the same time, it had to go with the surname Block, which is a running-into-a-brick-wall sort of name that cries out for at least a 2 or 3 syllable first name.) And I came up with the perfect name: Amanda. Because Amanda can be a sophisticated, Noel Coward sort of Amanda, or a sweet old-fashioned Amanda or a cute-as-a-button Mandy.
He wouldn't have liked it though.
Yeah, I knew I had a 50-50 chance, but I had a gut feeling I was going to have a girl. But since I got a boy, I named him Brian, after one of my 2 dearest friends. I wanted to name him after the other dearest friend, too, but his name was Alfred; no way was I going to do that to a harmless infant. But the middle name problem solved itself when I first saw my kid. He was LARGE. And long. And I realized he would need a really impressive name to bawl him out with (you know your mother's serious when she yells at you with first name, middle name, and last name). That's when it occurred to me that I did like Alfred's last name. So my son became Brian Friedrichsen Block you stop that immediately.
>We do need to take our naming seriously. Kids are going to turn into actual people someday. Not romance novel heroines (and I do believe it should be illegal for pregnant women to read romance novels when they're pregnant--they find the damnedest names for their babies there). Not people who will share their parents' simple amusement in the delightful joke of the name they've bestowed. Not necessarily tough, strong little boys who can take any amount of punishment from vicious bullies.
We should take all our sadistic naming impulses and save them for our cats and dogs. A winning entry in a New York Magazine competition for mangled proverbs says, "Give a dog a bad name and he'll like it just as well as Fido." This is not true of children.
Previous Columns: Something Amyth , In Praise of Men, Small Truths , White Whine, Draft Dodger, Tar Baby, Sensible Lizards, Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought, Light Out, Staying on the Map, Don't just stand there..., Remotely Funny, No Government Day, Advice For Desperate Men
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