00:01:11.960Yeah, and yeah, I had a large collection of secondhand Cabot Patch dolls that I very
00:01:17.440carefully picked first and middle names for them because you know that that's how cabbage
00:01:21.800pie cells work but they came with a birth certificate i have a not if you bought them
00:01:25.720at a flea market very true but yes i i was born in 1983 so i did have the the you know my my
00:01:33.680grandmother was brawling people in the in toys r us to get me the authentic diana adria was her name
00:01:40.360But I'm also a fiction writer, so I think I had thought of it more as sort of an addendum to that.
00:01:48.480So when I started graduate school, I went in thinking, OK, I'm going to do something with multilingualism or I'm going to do something with folklore or something that feels more academic.
00:01:58.440And then as I was sort of trying to talk about dissertation topics with my advisor, I was just in his office.
00:02:03.920He had young kids and he went on a mini rant about how a name that he had chosen for one of his kids was way more popular than he had expected.
00:02:14.160And I said, so, you know, there's actually a weird phenomenon that's been happening for the last 30 or 40 years where the names at the top of the list are not actually as popular as they look anymore.
00:02:26.320And I just sort of intro dumped that in for about five, 10 minutes.
00:02:28.880And he looked at me and said, have you picked your dissertation topic yet?
00:02:32.400Because this sounds like a dissertation topic to me.
00:02:34.920Right. And your dissertation was more focused on how parents specifically choose names, correct?
00:02:40.500And that has, like, as we'll get into in this episode, that has so much to do with, like, how you were trying to bestow class signifiers and so much else.
00:03:35.740But yeah, for those parents, it really felt like a very loaded sort of, I am giving my child this cultural product, and I need to make sure it's the right kind of cultural product.
00:03:48.920But then I, yeah, then I also did some interviews with some of my respondents' parents just to sort of get like a baseline of like, okay, if you were naming kids in the 70s or 80s, what was that like?
00:04:10.280I can tell you, in my baby book, because my name is a little unusual for someone born in the early 80s, my mom says, yeah, you know, we wanted a name that was a little bit different.
00:04:21.760So she had to sort of take her name dictionary and be like, okay, of the 1,200 names in this book, this is one that I like the sound of, but that I haven't heard before.
00:04:33.400Shout out to the baby name dictionary.
00:04:35.360I like someone that I babysat for had one and I hours just hours just looking at it you know it's
00:04:43.140so fascinating but I think you have to be someone kind of like both you and I that are like what are
00:04:49.440all the names that exist and where like what do they mean well and like I can tell you like the
00:04:55.740business of baby naming has changed in really interesting way where you know the most popular
00:05:01.040our naming website now is nameberry which is pamela redmond satran and linda rosenkrantz and
00:05:05.860like they both came out of glamour magazine so it is more like interior design it's it's here are
00:05:11.560some names and then here's our professional opinion on how on the style associated with
00:05:15.580those names totally okay before we go further let's start with our questions because we have
00:05:20.480so many they're so good i when i like selected these ones i sent them to melody and i was like
00:05:25.060this is way way way too many like we will have to do another episode but i can't i can't win
00:05:31.020of them down. So we're just going to see how far we get. Okay. Okay. This first question comes from
00:05:36.080Becca and Melody is going to read it. Why do some names have staying power? Why are Helen and
00:05:41.660Alexander names that have lasted literally thousands of years and haven't dropped under
00:05:46.660500 top names in the U.S. since we've started keeping track? But names like Wilbur tank and
00:05:52.440never make a comeback. What I'm doing in the background here is I'm looking at Helen's
00:05:56.680popularity track. Helen is not that popular. I know this because it's my middle name.
00:06:01.520It's my middle name. Yeah. Yeah. Your listener's right that Helen is number 424 last year.
00:06:07.520So just barely in the top 500. Yeah. But in 1919, Helen was number two.
00:06:13.480Yeah. Approximately when my grandmother, for whom I'm named, was born. Yeah. Like not much later
00:06:19.900than that. Yeah. I mean, my husband and father-in-law are both named Alexander. And my
00:06:24.800husband was born in 1982. My father-in-law was born in 1955. And I can tell you there are a lot
00:06:29.960more Alexanders in school in the 80s than there were in the 50s. Yes. To me, the thinking is
00:06:35.360always that great-grandmother's names seem old and distinguished. Your mother's generation of
00:06:44.160names feel outmoded. Grandma, there's still some currency in passing it down. But I just love
00:06:51.780seen when great grandmas like reached that point so like my i will be fascinated when our parents
00:06:58.640like we're speaking as as millennials when our parents their names become fashionable again
00:07:05.500yeah so like linda jennifer patty laura even so you are the interesting thing you are naming
00:07:14.460only women's names right men's names have not been a fashion item for nearly as long true
00:07:21.500So Michael was the top, the number one name for like 40 something years.
00:07:43.180Like, there are a lot of Mikes in our generation.0.87
00:07:45.660And they're just like, it's like, I can think of one or two little, you know, child Michaels that I know, but it's, it's not this pervasive thing.0.98
00:07:53.620It's definitely cycling out. But okay, so what is it that like, makes a name feel consistent? Or stay like a Michael, right? Like, stay in that way, and not seem worn out?
00:08:04.920Yeah, well, I think it's not entirely whimsical, but there's definitely an element of whimsy in it. Like, Wilbur, which is your listener's other example, was never a wildly popular name, but then Edie White gave it to a pig, and then it sort of, well, that's a pig's name.0.51
00:08:22.700i think the only girl's name that is basically unmarked by time is elizabeth yeah and i think
00:08:34.140that's because if you're elizabeth you can be liz or you can be betty or you can be beth or you can
00:08:40.060be ellie or you know there's so many nickname options but that it doesn't feel dated yeah my
00:08:46.440mother-in-law's name is barbara which is like a lovely 50s name but there's not a lot of like
00:08:50.880like you can't be like oh we'll name her Barbara and then we'll call her some contemporary short
00:08:56.400name like this it's not a lot yeah no no that's that's so interesting right so like if it is a
00:09:03.740more quote-unquote classic name if there's a way to iterate on it and I you see that a lot I think
00:09:09.520with like like Charles which is my brother's name um and also my um my partner's name is
00:09:17.700they're both charles but my partner goes by charlie and i actually now i'm seeing a lot of
00:09:24.360people not give their kids the classic name like the nickname is what they want and they don't want
00:09:31.160any of that like confusion between like the the full formal name and the nickname so like my on
00:09:38.180my best friend's kid is just charlie and my other best friend's kid is just leo not leonardo right
00:09:44.600It's just Leo. And so just like foreclosing that possibility of iteration and being very, very specific about what your kid will be called.
00:09:53.420That seems really interesting to me, too. Right.
00:09:56.000And talking about cycles, like using nicknames as legal names is not a new phenomenon either.
00:10:03.000And I don't have the data in front of me, but I wonder if that's like a class thing where, you know, if you're trying to name your kids so that they'll sound like the Supreme Court justice, which is the go-to thing from a lot of the people I talk to of, I don't want Justice Millie.
00:10:18.160I want Justice Millicent, who is called Millie.
00:10:21.980Yeah, they want like the cute name for their kid when they're young, but the opportunity to formalize.
00:10:26.900is yeah i i find it difficult because my the name that i went by all during childhood from infancy
00:10:34.840was annie and i still understand myself as an annie and chose a formal name and this is something
00:10:42.860that you will recognize i chose a formal name when i was in grad school so that i could differentiate
00:10:47.200from another ann peterson yeah and and i also chose to use ann instead of annie when i first
00:10:55.000started teaching to almost like create because I was a graduate student I was 25 years old my
00:10:59.560students were only like five years younger than me I was trying to create a formal persona that
00:11:04.260I could occupy but now I run into all of these problems with like different iterations of my
00:11:10.760name existing out of the world and people not knowing what to call me and sometimes I'm just
00:11:14.180like I wish I had one name that was easy and that no one would ever like have to ask me how to refer
00:11:20.220to me. Okay, so let's keep on staying power and hear this question from Emily. Why am I so obsessed
00:11:26.220with having my kids' names be tied to some kind of lineage or meaning? I find myself kind of judging
00:11:31.860people unintentionally who just pull names they like and give it to their kids. My daughter is a
00:11:36.840year old. Her name is Lorraine. She's named after my husband's great-grandmother. Of course, I love
00:11:42.040the name, but I find myself explaining the meaning to people as if that matters. My husband and I are
00:11:47.580thinking about having another child, and I already find myself stressing about what that child's name
00:11:52.000could possibly be that would also be as meaningful. So I want to zero in on this idea of meaning.
00:11:59.520So what are the different ways that parents think of meaning when they're choosing a name?
00:12:04.040So first of all, Emily, I was you when my second child was born because my daughter has a legacy
00:12:10.060name from my husband's family. And so I'm like, oh God, the second one needs to have an equally
00:12:14.880weighty name. Very few people now approach the process as, eh, just pick something, it's fine.
00:12:22.860Like my sister's name, my parents picked it in the car on the way to the hospital.
00:12:26.320I don't think many people do that anymore. I actually wrote a post about this on my
00:12:31.320substack talking about my son's name, that I think people feel like the name needs to have
00:12:38.400a really good story. And, you know, whether that's, it needs to be a family name, or whether
00:12:45.000it's, it needs to have a really, really important linguistic meaning, or it needs to be tied to our
00:12:50.760heritage, or, you know, it's different for different families. And I go back again to kind
00:12:55.140of the culture around naming that I think, you know, if you go and buy a book, or look at a
00:13:01.860website, that there's all this rhetoric about this is the most important gift you can give your
00:13:05.980child this is so so so so important that people are like oh well i can't just say oh well we liked
00:13:12.940it and you know we thought it sounded pretty but what i said in my post about it was that's a name
00:13:19.080story too right saying this was my favorite name and i and i gave it to you like that's that that
00:13:26.780is also special yeah a friend of mine was named for a character on a soap opera erica and that's
00:13:33.600a great story you know what i mean like i just like every story is a story and just because it
00:13:39.060comes from your family doesn't make it any more or less important but i do think that's funny how
00:13:43.340like what i see from emily they see family lineage as important and some people for whatever reason
00:13:52.280like do not think of heritage like yeah that way right yeah when i was doing my dissertation
00:13:57.680because you know i i i was at uc berkeley so the the people who were most readily accessible to me
00:14:03.480to interview were middle and upper middle class white liberals. I talked to a lot of those people.
00:14:10.380And then because I was trying to be a good social scientist, I really tried to get some people from
00:14:14.480other demographics to also talk to. So my white liberal base was very dismissive of quote unquote
00:14:22.860made up names, which, you know, all names are made up. We can go on a tangent about that another
00:14:27.560time. But everyone wanted a name that was different. But people from the college-educated
00:14:35.340white demographic really wanted a name that had been used by other white people at some time
00:14:41.200throughout history, but not too much and not too recently. And then I interviewed a working-class
00:14:47.500African-American mom whose kids had very distinctive names. And she said, yeah, I invented0.71
00:14:54.200by kids' names myself. They didn't come from a book. They didn't come from anyone else's idea.
00:14:57.640They are a gift from me. And I thought, you know, if I went back to those other people
00:15:02.460and put that framing on it, I bet they would think differently.
00:15:06.300Because there's a lot of different ways to find meaning in the gift of a name.
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00:19:20.920Since we're talking about goals, I want to do this question, this next question from Rachel.
00:19:25.520It feels like uniqueness is a quality people have started looking for more and more in names, sometimes unique spelling, but maybe also just not in the top 100, 500, 1,000 baby names.
00:19:38.260I'm a millennial in my late 30s, and I've known many Rachels, Jennifers, Jessicas, Sarahs, both with and without an H, in my age bracket.
00:19:46.500But people my age often want less popular names for their own kids.
00:19:50.840Is the search for a more unique baby name a millennial-intensive parenting thing?
00:19:54.720an individualism thing? Is it simply because we have access to the data in a way that prior
00:20:00.400generations did not? What's your take? Thanks so much for this show topic. Baby names are my Roman
00:20:06.160empire. So yeah what is your take here? Well I mean so this is what I wrote my dissertation on
00:20:14.440essentially. So it is definitely true everyone wants a name that is unique but not weird. I had
00:20:20.860chapter titled The Goldilocks Name because everyone from every background wants that unique
00:20:26.440but not too strange. And I can tell you it is not a millennial thing because the sort of broader
00:20:34.500decline in popular names has been happening since the late 60s. Oh, interesting. The easiest thing
00:20:41.440to pull on the social security website, I was pulling some numbers this morning for you. So
00:20:46.040this year in 2024, the top 20 boys' names were 12% of all births in the U.S. and top 20 girls
00:20:52.780were 10%. Wow. When I was born in 1983, 36% of boys, 25% of girls got top 20 names. When my dad
00:21:01.740was born in 1956, 44% of boys and 32% of girls got top 20 names. How much of this can be connected
00:21:10.000to just like a general decline in religiosity in the United States?
00:21:15.760So there's a really excellent book by a guy named, another sociologist named Stan Lieberson,
00:21:22.300the book's A Matter of Taste. And he basically uses names as his unit of analysis to talk about
00:21:27.980fashion trends. And so he lays out sort of, okay, there's this decline happening. And it's not
00:21:37.300urbanization and it's not increased cultural diversity and it's not the the availability
00:21:44.120of the official data because that didn't happen until 1998 and it is happening somewhat in the
00:21:49.500uk and in canada and and other other english-speaking places but it is more pronounced
00:21:54.180in the u.s and it seems like it's really just sort of correlated with the broader desire to stand
00:22:02.020out. So it is individualism then? Yeah, but it's not any one obvious, oh, well, you know, there's
00:22:09.820more immigrants now, so that's why. Well, no, if you look at the charts, American-born moms are
00:22:16.420substantially more likely to pick uncommon names than immigrant moms for the most part.
00:22:21.180That's so interesting. Well, and I also, I think about when I was teaching, oftentimes
00:22:26.800Sometimes international students who came to the U.S. would pick an Americanized name, especially ones from Asian students and China in particular. And they would often pick an Americanized name that sounded the most similar to their Chinese name. So I had two 10th grade students whose names were Shirley and Peggy.
00:22:51.040again teaching at cal i i had a lot of a lot of asian and asian american students as well
00:22:58.300latino students you see some of this as well too where parents who have come to the u.s but did not
00:23:03.620grow up in american culture say i'm going to pick an american name yeah but i don't really have my
00:23:08.740finger on what a modern american name is so so i might name my my kid donald or ruth or walter
00:23:16.180which is not a name that most Gen Zers would have but I know it's an American name so I'm
00:23:23.520going to use that but and also and this goes back to this understanding of like I picked it because
00:23:27.660I liked it right like they're they're when we talk about liking a name you like it because of
00:23:34.640what you see it as providing right like the entryway it seems to provide but also you like
00:23:40.300something about the way that it sounds so like they still like they like the name Wilbur right
00:23:45.840or they like the name um steve i'm also thinking of names my dogs are all named like basically like
00:23:55.120uh gen x and boomer names but that's because they are they are named for people who were
00:24:01.640alive during those times like i have a dog named beverly and she's named for my partner's
00:24:05.900grandmother like and that to me like you're not going to see a bev like there's something so
00:24:11.620lovely and about meeting a dog with the name of a grandma right um yeah my son who i named after
00:24:19.000my grandfather uh his name is robert it's still in the top 100 but it is not a name people would
00:24:24.740expect on an upper middle class little white boy he's called rob by all of the sundry he knows
00:24:31.380about six dads named rob but he doesn't know any melody's partner is bobby so yeah well yeah yeah
00:24:39.420He doesn't know any other kids named Rob.
00:26:03.620But so Stan Lieberson talked about this in his book, that basically in the same way that like, you know, hemlines will get longer and longer and longer until they get too long and then they'll go shorter, shorter, shorter again.
00:27:50.080This just reminds me of another one of my friends who worked so hard to come up with really perfect names.
00:27:56.740she feels very strongly about her name she loves her name she wanted her kids to feel like they
00:28:01.300could love their names too and worked so hard at it and then does and wouldn't tell anyone what she
00:28:06.880was thinking about right she just wanted to be like unadulterated in her choice and then named
00:28:11.440her her little girl kylie and really oh honey and we're like like the kardashian and she had
00:28:20.820no idea. Like she just wasn't plugged into that world, you know, and, but still it's a, now her
00:28:26.880Kylie is the Kylie that I think of. So next question, really interesting. And you have some
00:28:32.500experience with this. So I was, I really wanted to include this as well. So this question comes
00:28:36.980from Oliver who uses they, them pronouns. How do names become trendy and why do these trends
00:28:42.180feel so ubiquitous, even in disparate social circles? As a trans person and an elementary
00:28:47.180school teacher, I noticed that the names trans people get excited about for themselves
00:28:50.940and the names new parents get excited about for their babies are often following the exact same
00:28:55.620trends. See the often parodied hordes of transmasculine Aiden, Kadens, and Jadens who came0.74
00:29:01.320out and chose their names in the mid-2010s, and the 10-year-old kids I teach now who all of those
00:29:06.060names as well. See also the Elis, Lukas, Leos, and then the Isabels, and Mias, and Avas, and so on,
00:29:12.180who could either be my most recent crop of kindergartners or your average all-trans group
00:29:16.720of D&D players. As a transmasculine Oliver who has now taught many much younger Olivers,
00:29:22.620I have always found this incredibly funny and also just a little embarrassing for us
00:29:26.520trendy baby-named adults. Was there always this much overlap if we look back through
00:29:30.760trans histories and baby-named trends of past decades? And what broader social and cultural
00:29:36.020factors are people responding to when we all gravitate towards the same names, whether
00:29:40.360choosing them for ourselves or for our children?
00:29:42.300that's a complicated one right like i i i worked this spring with a non-binary client who was
00:29:49.300looking for a new chosen name and they were actually pretty aware of i like this name this
00:29:54.620name and this name that i heard on a kid that i taught in swim class and i don't know that they
00:30:01.000that there's enough solid data on the trans community through time to to really look at
00:30:06.700how how that trend has has been there but I think my my first thought and answer is
00:30:11.940sounds like Oliver at least is of the same generation as people who are having kids right
00:30:17.540now yeah so I think if you hear a name and you go oh that's a little bit different and funky I like
00:30:24.540that I think whether you're looking for a name for yourself or your child there's a tendency to
00:30:29.620to sort of fall into that trap totally no and like if all of us were choosing our names right now
00:30:36.980right if like all of our names were wiped and we all got to choose names now we would not go back
00:30:42.480and choose what are often understood as like the tired names that the people that we grew up with
00:30:48.920like those are not names that are novel or interesting or electric right yeah i mean i i
00:30:55.520can tell you that you know this is not the trans community but it's it's people naming people who
00:31:03.220are not babies you look at tv character names right which which which i did a post about and
00:31:09.340i'm going no one was named lucas in 1972 or however old the stranger stranger things kids
00:31:15.160are supposed to be like come on right mike and will and nancy those are good names for kids born
00:31:20.840in the 70s lucas is not a good kid born in the 70s name really i for some reason i feel like
00:31:26.600that's an old like somewhat maybe luke just luke right yeah well and yeah yeah it's an old name
00:31:33.240but lucas is a very very popular contemporary name right my partner and i sat down to watch
00:31:38.340freaks and geeks and like in the first 10 minutes you meet the main character i think her name is
00:31:44.440ashley and i'm like you were born in like 1965 this this is like 1981 your name wouldn't be
00:31:50.760ashley come on that's a name for someone who was born in 1981 right right right right right yeah
00:31:56.880i think people when they're creating a show are trying to make their characters relatable
00:32:02.340and so they say oh i'll pick this cool name yeah it's familiar and cool and notable right
00:32:08.560instead of necessarily like absolutely historically accurate yeah i could see that
00:32:13.980happening a ton with like something that's set in like the 19th century you're like this sounds
00:32:18.020like a 19th century name right and when it was maybe not a name that like especially for like
00:32:23.980i don't know something like the gilded age or something like oh i wrote a thing about uh because
00:32:28.660i i was a 90s child so american girls were were my jam yeah samantha is not a name you would have
00:32:36.000given your child in 1894 that's just that just that just wouldn't have happened but it sounds
00:32:41.540so victorian if you're a kid i was like oh yes yes to a kid in the 90s samantha's a very fancy
00:32:49.460name yeah but like i'm sitting here going okay what were theodore roosevelt's daughters named
00:32:53.780okay like one was alice and i think one was edith and if pleasant company had asked me
00:32:59.620then then i would have been like here are some upper class names that would be appropriate for
00:33:04.840this for this character but you gotta kind of yeah you have to strike a balance between i want
00:33:09.760this to read correctly to the audience right well and even before the existence of samantha the doll
00:33:15.280like to me samantha was a fancy girl name when i was growing up and it's like they like collided
00:33:21.360with that understanding and expanded it into now i think most millennials who had any access to
00:33:28.360american girl dolls would be like yes samantha is a name for a fancy girl yeah yeah and a cool girl
00:33:35.060goes by sam and and i will say you know stepping back to oliver's original question like i i haven't
00:33:44.480worked with a lot of adults but just like parents people who are renaming themselves like i i know
00:33:51.060one trans woman who when she picked her new name she took her whatever her birth name was
00:33:56.100went to the data for her birth year and picked the girl name that was at the same rank
00:34:00.220oh and said and said this is my new name and that's a much more methodical way right instead
00:34:06.740of like a vibes based way someone else who i've worked with a little bit is like i want a name
00:34:11.640that's not going to stand out and he kind of spoke about some of the same stuff that oliver was was
00:34:16.540pointing out that like a lot of people who pick chosen names pick something that is really
00:34:21.780distinctive for their age group right and this person was like i i don't want that i don't want
00:34:26.760i don't want someone to hear my name like at a party and be like oh that's a trans person
00:34:30.800oh yeah yeah yeah so they wanted to like keep their name undistinctive in some way yeah right
00:34:36.840yeah and i know a lot of trans people who also pick the name that sounds the most like the gender
00:34:43.220that they they are yeah like that their for their dead name was maybe similar so like all of to
00:34:50.780oliver right so sometimes you get that and then sometimes people are like i don't want anything
00:34:54.560to do with my dead name so it's much it's it's kind of like parents naming right like sometimes
00:34:59.540you want that distance and sometimes you want that proximity well i don't have an academic
00:35:03.940appointment right now so i'm i'm not sort of in in that headspace so like i'm gonna go do a research
00:35:08.340study on this but living in the bay i know a lot of trans and gender fluid kids and it seems like
00:35:16.000the way kids choose their names is very different like like adults will sit down it'll be a long
00:35:23.380process it might take months it might take years kids will be like i like that person i'm gonna
00:35:31.020pick their name yeah like every every trans and gender fluid kid i know their name is well i guess
00:35:37.580that's not true most their their name is from a namesake either someone they know in real life
00:35:43.500or someone that someone from a you know character which again not that different from how people
00:35:49.080name their kids right it's just that we have culturally I think gravitated towards this like
00:35:54.780a name has to be over determined in this way for you to be doing it quote-unquote right
00:35:59.540whereas sometimes it is and it was historically as simple as like
00:36:03.840here's someone I know and like I'm gonna name it for that person
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00:38:01.100Today's episode is sponsored by MOSH. So last weekend, I had my first ski adventure of the
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00:40:00.000Okay, our next question gets to something that we've been teasing this entire episode, which is about ideological splits and the specific way that class, I think, comes into this.
00:40:25.760I live in a very blue city and would personally identify as pretty left, if anything.
00:40:32.900My name list is mostly great-grandparent kind of names, old literature kind of names.
00:40:38.580A lot of people I know who espouse more traditional values seem to have a preference for much less traditional names,
00:40:47.200which isn't necessarily a bad thing to do. I'm just curious about why.
00:40:52.100Okay, so first I think we need to do a little bit of decoding here.
00:40:55.760Because there's also a question that we got, which is about like adding an extra GH to a name and how this person perceives that extra GH to like, oftentimes that's someone who is a conservative white person.
00:41:10.880I think what she's trying to gesture to is like this idea that people who are more bourgeois are currently gravitating towards names that are either gesturing towards the past or like have a little bit of like ancestor signification and then also then gesturing towards people who are more traditional.
00:41:37.040I think that means conservative here, tend to be into newly made up names.
00:41:41.260Somebody did a study on this a few years ago, and I don't have it at my fingertips, but
00:41:44.740it came out around the time of the 2008 election, and they compared the names of Barack Obama's
00:41:49.820kids and the names of Sarah Palin's kids.
00:41:52.120And they're saying, you know, look, you have one where it's like, everything is very soft
00:41:56.780and flowing, and one where the names are full of stops.
00:42:00.940I think the Romney kids are similar, and the names are just very consonant heavy.
00:42:04.640I feel like the Romney kids are all named, like, Tuck or something like that.
00:42:09.540To that, I would say, like, there are definitely regional differences in style. Like, I've got a post that basically I say, here's the top 10 from the U.S. last year, and then here's the top 10 in Vermont and North Dakota and California and Florida.
00:42:29.860And, you know, California and Florida are both large, diverse states with different politics, and Vermont and North Dakota are both small white states with different politics.
00:42:38.840And you can see, like, okay, yeah, there's definitely some variation, because your political orientation is still a peer group, right?
00:42:49.300So I think whether you like it or not, no matter how much of an aggressive individual one tries to be, you are still influenced by what you watch, what you read, the names that you hear on the playground.
00:43:04.000That's still going to shape your sort of your mental space of what your options are.
00:43:10.400What about, I've seen various studies about this, but how like a name enters into like the bourgeois naming sphere. And then there's like a trickle down effect, how names that were understood as like connotations of class and oftentimes, so something like Arthur, I think would be up there.
00:43:31.400like that was one of the names um then over time they over like a decade two decades they become
00:43:39.960much more popular within working class populations in part because they are understood as upper class
00:43:47.400names so you give your kid an upper class name but then maybe you add that gh on the end
00:43:54.080to also add in a splash of that individualism that feels important it's one of those things
00:44:00.080it's really hard to track because you say, well, okay,
00:44:04.100how do you get upper-class names? Like, just from a
00:44:08.100data perspective, it's, well, okay, am I looking at, you know,
00:44:12.000certain zip codes or congressional districts or
00:44:15.740yeah. But I do think there is definitely
00:44:20.040a, again, it's a cultural product, so it sort of
00:44:24.100follows the rules of other cultural products where if this is what
00:44:27.740the people you want to be do then you are going to try to do that right it's an aspirational name
00:44:34.320yeah well and this is a bit of a cliche but also a thing that happens that you know working class
00:44:41.040people will say oh well i'm going to name my kid after this luxury brand right where a more bourgeois
00:44:47.040person would never name their kid after a brand that would not be a that would not feel like like
00:44:52.760the right kind of name to them. But why is that? Can you spell that out? In a way, it's, it's a
00:44:58.280version of what we were talking about before with immigrant parents, where it's, your context is
00:45:03.020different. Yeah. If you're someone who has never driven a Lexus and will never drive a Lexus or,
00:45:10.140or a Mercedes, then you say, well, Mercedes was named after a person, by the way, like.
00:45:19.660I think the car was named after the inventor's daughter.0.81
00:45:25.120But if you're an American working class person who will never drive a Mercedes, then you say, oh, I'm going to name my kid Mercedes because that sounds classy.
00:45:36.420Where if you're someone who has a Mercedes, you'd say, I'm not going to name my kid after the car.
00:45:41.260That's not the right kind of inspiration.
00:45:45.100That, well, and this is also just like how we think about how you should express wealth or desire for wealth, right? So like a bourgeois upper class or upper, just like a super rich person is like, oh, the way that I show that my family is wealthy is by like passing down the same name, right? And not being aspirational in my naming. Like giving someone a name and then like giving them a waspy nickname, like Mint, right? Like that is how you show wealth.
00:46:59.420I know there's research about how your name impacts your hireability, but I think it's pretty old and predates the rise of gender-neutral names.
00:47:07.380Is there any new evidence for how being a Charlie or a Billy or a Frankie impacts your professional prospects?
00:47:16.220So that was one of the things I did this morning was I was digging around, seeing if someone had done that study on specifically gender neutral names without it also being a study about gender identity.
00:47:28.700Yeah. I found, you know, a few studies saying if someone included non-binary pronouns on their
00:47:34.560resume, it sadly and unsurprisingly had a negative effect on callback rates. But I didn't see
00:47:40.200anything about if there's no gender markers at all. But I would guess, just based on pre-existing
00:47:46.000research, that, you know, all of those people who name their daughters androgynous names saying,
00:47:49.920well, to help them get a job, are probably, if you're looking for whatever, a white-collar,
00:47:54.940traditionally masculine coded job are probably sadly correct but also the diminutive here is
00:48:03.100also something that's interesting and i say this as someone who's partnered with a charlie and
00:48:07.780melody is partnered with a bobby and like i have a friend who was a billy and then goes by bill
00:48:13.180professionally like there is this understanding that like somehow at like the nickname is not
00:48:18.600serious how does that work because i feel like that's falling away i don't think that's yeah
00:48:24.040Well, it makes me think about everyone was mortified that we had a president named Jimmy or Bill.
00:48:45.600But I think our awareness of race is increased, well, maybe not increased, but remains stable, right?
00:48:52.940Like the way that people make judgments based on what they perceive from a person's name in terms of their race.
00:49:00.800Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, that was the first of those resume audit studies. I think it's been redone several times. And yeah, it's most especially with African-American coded names.
00:49:21.020Which was something I heard from parents when I was doing my research saying, you know, OK, I want a name that's going to honor our heritage, but isn't going to kneecap my kid.
00:49:31.640it just makes me think of the fact that like we the people who are allowed to create unique names
00:49:38.740are are white people right like that are allowed to like still have those names be like seamlessly
00:49:44.300incorporated into american society remain like the standard still remains like right aspirationally
00:49:50.940white in some way so to end let's maybe let's do a little bit on middle names because i think
00:49:56.800middle names are fascinating. I especially think the idea that everyone should have a middle name
00:50:01.300is also, it's not standardized. So I would love to talk more about that. But this question comes
00:50:08.100from Alta, and then we can kind of take it from there. Why do we all have the same middle name?
00:50:12.660For generations, the women in my mother's white Protestant family have all either had Anne,
00:50:18.700Marie, Elizabeth, Beth, or May. These are kind of listed in order of popularity.
00:50:25.100What inspired this, and why is it still pretty standard?
00:50:29.120Well, so the first thing I noticed there is, again, she only lists women's names.
00:50:33.360See, that's funny because I see it more commonly with men's names, the persistence.
00:50:39.380My first inclination, again, I couldn't find any numbers on this, but if I had to make an educated guess,
00:50:45.620I would say that the reason that there was this inclination toward kind of the filler names for girls
00:50:53.340is well you got to put something there but you don't you don't have to put something in there
00:50:59.100no no my father-in-law does not have a middle name my brother-in-law does not have a middle
00:51:02.700name it's yeah it's not a requirement this does come middle names does come from primarily from
00:51:08.700catholicism correct because you're taking that's that's that's that's one one route i mean basically
00:51:14.720middle names became a thing when people started to live in communities wide enough that everyone
00:51:20.340had the problem that you had. Right. They didn't want to, they wanted to differentiate their Maria
00:51:25.140from a different Marie. Yeah. Historically in Catholicism, everyone had Maria or had Maria or0.89
00:51:31.000Joseph or, you know, the local equivalent as part of their name for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Also,
00:51:36.440you know, it's, it's a way like there's a tradition of putting the mother's maiden name
00:51:41.660as a middle name in, in a lot of parts of the country. Yeah. And I think my experience of the
00:51:47.560families that, that I've worked with and, and kids that I know, kids' middle names are not
00:51:52.260filler anymore. That's it for, it seems like a lot, a lot, a lot of people are, are, are putting
00:51:58.360a family name in there. Yeah. No, I think there, there's like a lot more meaning and thought
00:52:03.640attached to it. And oftentimes now I'm seeing like, uh, kind of like the name that you almost
00:52:09.040wish, like the aspirational name, like the even weirder name sometimes, or like a name that,
00:52:13.660that sounds really cool with the first name um yeah well that goes back to the the naming culture1.00
00:52:19.460thing like like i can tell you the nameberry ladies basically push that they say yeah the0.91
00:52:25.660middle name slot is a great place to put the name that is a little too crazy to use as a first name0.99
00:52:31.220whereas before it was like oh well here's how you honor the relative that you're not naming
00:52:36.080your child well and also i you know we got another question about um jewish names and
00:52:41.080Someone was commenting, we had like a thread, a culture study thread a couple of weeks ago that somehow went into names.
00:52:46.860And someone was talking about how they always are astounded when they see someone name their child for a living relative because it's considered like an ill omen to do that.
00:53:00.640And within Jewish families, like you will never name someone who is still alive.
00:53:05.220In Ashkenazi traditions specifically, I think.0.95
00:53:08.040Yeah. And so you but you can name and honor someone who's already dead. So that would be like a way to really pass down names that I think we see it a little bit still, especially when people are like exhausted by coming up with the first name and they're like, oh, we're just going to put in a different name.
00:53:24.600I do think that it also is a way to show continuity. So on my dad's side of the family, there's like the middle name is Arthur, like all the way up to great grandfather. It's like Arthur, middle name's just going down.
00:53:38.040which is kind of like weird and cool right you're like why do I have this name because everyone had
00:53:42.920this name right my kids are weird because they they each had we we ended up doing only family
00:53:49.020names which is not what I would have anticipated before I was partnered and having children which
00:53:54.360is the other thing I tell people is like it has to be you know it has to be something that works
00:53:58.360for everybody yeah yeah we had this legacy name that my my partner really wanted to use and so
00:54:04.380So I was like, OK, I guess I guess we're working in the family name sphere then.
00:54:08.900And yeah, so what we ended up doing was basically our kids first and middle names come from the four branches of our of our families.
00:54:16.440Yeah. And I'm Anne Helen's grandma, grandma. I will say the last thing that we got a question from a mom who wants she I think she's pregnant and she wants to name her child wants to give them a grandma's name, Ruth, as their middle name, no matter what, no matter what.
00:54:35.860and other people have been like oh how could you like what if it's a boy like how they can't like
00:54:41.620curse this child with like the middle name ruth i think it's cool and i think she should do it
00:54:46.620i i mean it's it's also a word like right like yeah like it means kindness yeah i what i tell
00:54:55.100clients is no matter how hard you try no matter how how much sleep you lose there will be something
00:55:01.660about your kid's name that they don't like yeah there there will be something about your kid's
00:55:06.300name that you did not anticipate before they were born yeah and probably they will be fine
00:55:13.560whether they hate their name or love their name or hate it sometimes and love it sometimes
00:55:18.420if if they really hate it then they'll change it because you're giving them
00:55:21.960we are legally allowed to change our names you're giving them a gift and if the gift doesn't fit