Hehehe. Every year I look forward to the Social Security Administration releasing statistics on the previous year's baby names. I love it! I can't explain exactly why, either.... Kind of funny. But I definitely love that their website is so cool, and I also love to giggle and/or be amazed at random cultural trends. The SSA website (it deserves a second hyperlink...! :)) has statistics from 1880! You can type in a name and track its popularity over time. OR, you can type in a year and see the most popular names (by numbers AND percentage... sometimes up to the top 1000 names). OR, you can look at the most popular baby names by state. It's awesome. We have a baby name book that accused Mormons of starting the last-name-as-first-name trend (which, for the record, I detest—I had to say it!) and, if you look at Idaho and Utah in random years, you can giggle at how that appears to be true. (Little sidenote: word of this naming phenomenon has reached the other side of the world! When we were in Wales recently, we laughed our heads off over a really funny radio personality going off on how Americans don't have first names anymore. "So your last name is Hennecher...you're going to name your kid Brandt? Brandt Hennecher...? 'Hello, I'm Brandt Hennecher....' What torture! I'm telling you—Americans these days don't have first names!" Many a funny story was told.... It was great ridicule. :))
You can also get a good smile over things like Emma staying #1 after the "Friends" baby was named Emma, or how, for a little while, more than 1 in 50 girls was being named Emily or Emma. Jacob gets well over 1% of the baby boys! In fact, the year Seth was born, the top THREE boy names were all over 1% (and one of those, Joshua, is the only other boy name we even sort of like these days, so...bummer...). That's a lot of boys with the same names.... (You can see how there's so much less to choose from with boys than girls, though. You only get down the 100's and end up with boy names like Oscar, Omar, Edgar, Hector, Sawyer, Maximus, Felix, Holden, Ryker, and other dog and cat names. Hehe. The girl names stay a lot more normal.... :))
Anyway, there is endless amusement to be had at the SSA website. Hehe.
Recently, they released the latest statistics along with a pretty funny press release. The paragraph about puzzling baby name experts around the world and resisting legislative efforts totally cracked me up, as well as the well-placed comment about the name Armani. Ha ha ha!
4 comments:
HaHa! The very first thing Derek said when we started talking about boy's names was that it absolutely can NOT be Aiden or anything that rhymes with it! Since then I've noticed it does seem like about half of boys are named something like that.
Seriously though we're having a pretty tough time with boy's names ourselves. Since no one can say or spell our last name we feel like we owe the kid a first name that people are familiar with, but they're all really common or really weird. A girl would have been so much easier.
I looked at the list of names you had the picture of, naturally thinking they were this last years names (not seeing it plainly said 1880) and my first thought was, "Wow! These are some old fashion names!" Silly me!
I went to the SSA's website last week to look at the top baby names, and TO MY HORROR saw that the name I have loved for YEARS is on there (granted, it's like #99 or something, but still). It was REALLY depressing. I have no idea what to name this girl inside me; maybe that's why she's not coming out . . . :)
I love watching for that too. I can't believe how it can shape what names people do or do not choose.
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