Tuesday, August 28, 2007

The Name Game

Naming things is very important. For instance, at Luscious Verde, we name our personal printers to avoid confusing our high-tech computer network. But perhaps there are more important things to name – like children, for example. The time-tested method of not naming a child for the first few years of their life just doesn’t work in today’s fast-paced, name-centric society. (It would be embarrassing to name your child Frank when they actually turn out to look more like a Chuck.)

Say you have a stake in naming a future baby (like our co-owner Wendy, who is four months pregnant). We highly recommend a visit to the Social Security Administration’s list of popular baby names. It lists the most used American names (sorted a bunch of different ways), going back all the way to the 1880s. Want to know how many Jacobs were born in 1957? They have the info.

What turns out to be the most interesting is the information at the bottom of the list, that is, the least popular baby names. Did you know that 236 boys were named “Joy” in the 1930s? (They probably had a lot of joy in their lives, at least until they got beat up at school for being named Joy.) Or that one of the least popular female names of the new millennium is, in fact, “Unique.” There are a little over one thousand little Uniques running around out there. How, uh, unique.

-- Khalid Davian Maximo (a.k.a. Rob) @ L.V.

1 comment:

Lindsay said...

There were 537 boys named "Jacob" in 1957.