All Those Wonderful Names

1
Choosing Names For Girls

Ballad of Beautiful Names

Emily, Rachel, Bernadette,
Ellen, Astrid, Fawn,
Cecilia, Tamar, Christabel,
Lolita, Inez, Dawn.
Marguerite, Rita, Angeline,
Keiko, Moira, Mae,
Corinne, Denise, May-Ree-Lynn,
Mahalia, Pauline, Faye.
Heidi, Haidee, Isabel,
Kathryn, Lucette, or Joy
(In Heaven yclept Euphrosyne).
Thank God you're not a boy.
Women Who Get into the Who's Whos

You hold your newborn daughter in your arms for the first time. Perhaps her father stands beside your hospital bed. You brush your lips across the baby's forehead and gaze adoringly, wonderingly, at her.

You say, "I wonder what she'll be like, what she'll become.

Will she be a great actress, dancer, teacher, politician, business person, industrial tycoon? Maybe she'll get into Who's Who."

"Maybe," your husband agrees. "A person doesn't have to be in Who's Who to be great, though. I'm not in it, and you're not, but you're great anyhow."

"I wonder if a girl's name helps to get her in or keep her out?"

"Probably not. It might be fun to browse in Who's Who in the library and see whether any first names keep popping up over and over. Does an unusual name help, or are Who's Who names like everybody else's?"

If you ever did look in Who's Who in the United States, Who's Who in Canada, or the British Who's Who, representative samplings of the names would look something like the following three lists. For each list, pages in a Who's Who were selected randomly, and women's names were recorded to a total of 250. (Men's names exceed women's by about 11 or 12 to 1, but that one-sided ratio is declining.)

How to Avoid a Baby's Name You Dislike

Use tact. That's what one husband, Raymond Roberts, did.

His wife, Alice, said, "If the baby is a girl, let's call her Lana."

Raymond detested that name, but didn't want to argue.

"Great!" he said. "The first girl I ever dated seriously was named Lana. She was beautiful, intelligent, and sexy. I've always liked that name."

Alice was silent for a few moments and then said, "Of course, we should talk over some other possibilities. What do you think of Marie, or Claudette, or Melanie?"

A Book about Some Modern Trends

In 1988 Beyond Jennifer and Jason, by Linda Rosenkrantz and Pamela R. Satran, was published by St. Martin's Press. Unlike most books on selecting a baby's name, it does not discuss the ancestral meaning of a name, but rather describes current (1980s) attitudes toward hundreds of names.

Fifteen pages are devoted to names that celebrities chose for their children. Ted Danson has a daughter named Alexis, Kim Alexis has a son Jamie, but Jamie is also the name of a Joan Lunden daughter. Mia Farrow seems to be the most versatile in choice of names: the old-fashioned Daisy, Dylan (a girl), Fletcher (a boy), the ethnically mixed name Gigi Soon Yi, Matthew Phineas, Satchel, and the beautifully poetic Lark Song. The son of Susan St. James is Harmony. The daughter of Mick and Bianca Jagger is Jade. Charlene Tilton's daughter is Cherish, and Sonny and Cher raised eyebrows by naming their daughter Chastity. Sylvester Stallone's son is Sage Moon Blood.

But more traditional names far outnumber the unusual, even among celebrities. A few examples: Katharine (Jane Seymour), Mary and Stella (Paul and Linda McCartney), Matthew (Christopher Reeve), Rachel (Kathleen Turner), William and Hannah (Mel Gibson), and Benjamin Simon (Carly Simon and James Taylor).

Rosenkrantz and Satran are interested not only in name-styles of the rich and famous. For example, they combine into one list the birth names most popular in five states: California, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, and Wisconsin. They report that in these states the ten most popular girls' names were, in order, Jessica, Amanda, Ashley, Jennifer, Sara(h), Nicole, Megan, Stephanie, Elizabeth, and Heather.

New York City's Favorite Given Names

In 1988 Jessica was the name most often given to New York City's newborn girls. Jessica supplanted Jennifer, which had been the leader since 1972. Other girls' names high on the list during the seventies and eighties, but changing order frequently, were Melissa, Nicole, Michelle, Elizabeth, Stephanie, Lisa, Tiffany, Amanda, Ashley, Samantha, Christina, and Danielle -- sometimes in variant forms such as Christine, Kristin, or Daniella.

Among boys born in the late eighties, Michael led in popularity as usual (ever since 1963). Other favorites of the seventies and eighties, in shifting order, were Christopher, David, John, Joseph, Anthony, Jason, Daniel, Robert, Jonathan, Matthew, Andrew, and James.

In those lists, Michelle, Stephanie, Christina, and Danielle are feminine forms of the biblical names Michael, Stephen, Christ (ian), and Daniel. Samantha, Elizabeth, and its derivative, Lisa, also are rooted in the Bible. The boys' names based on the Bible are Christopher, David, Joseph, John, Daniel, Jonathan, Andrew, Matthew, and James.

Almost a hundred years ago, the biblical influence in New York City name-giving was about equally evident in the most-chosen names. In the following lists of the 1898 leaders, Bible-based names are italicized:

Girls -- Mary, Catherine, Margaret, Annie, Rose, Marie (variant of Mary), Esther, Sarah, Frances, Ida

Boys -- John, William, Charles, George, Joseph, Edward, James, Louis, Francis, Samuel

Copyright © 1983 by J. N. Hook