THE NAME GAME

Dallas jewelry designer Dragon Lady sent me this one--a link to a fascinating name-o-meter which can provide hours--well, ok, minutes--of wholesome family entertainment. It's a graph which tracks the popularity of popular names since 1900. Bunny didn't even register. But it is fascinating to guess what makes which name popular when. Obviously, some names' popularity are linked to stars of the day, but others, like Cassandra and Ian have peaked inexplicably in recent years. Maybe those slightly weird or foreign-sounding names have only just sunk into our consciousness. And of course it's fun to type in names you remember from school. Seems like almost every girl I grew up with was named Lisa, Karen or Pam.

The recent (last 20 years) trend of "creatively" spelling names (eg: Lysah) or making up new ones (eg: Beyonce) has always irritated me when there are so many gorgeous old names which have fallen from favor and are due for a revival, like Daphne, Lydia and Pearl. I know they sound granny-ish cuz they've been out of style for decades. But they are real names which mean something with roots in various languages. Macy was my granny's name and it fell off the map for decades until recently--due to Macy Gray's success or some kind of grunge-y longing for something old-timey, arty or un-cheerleader-y, perhaps? Maybe Beyonce expresses something of the moment or maybe it's just plain ugly and stupid.

http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html