Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

In the name of

On my way home from work today I saw a nice little family scene, dad and mom and kid and baby out for a walk. Then the kid decided she could push the stroller, tried to run and oops, lost control.

No harm came to the baby; dad grabbed the stroller in time and it wasn't going that fast, but I could hear him scolding the kid "Kaitlyn!" (Or maybe it was Caitlin. Or Kaytelinne.) "Blah blah blah..!"

Ok, I tuned out after "Kaitlyn!" because the name Kaitlyn, and all its various spellings, cracks me up. I have noticed lately that when I hear a kid getting chewed out in public, it always seems to be a name that tops the trendy list. A few weeks ago I was in the grocery store and a brat, er, child, was bouncing a ball as hard as he could while his mother was checking out, and of course he wasn't catching the ball, it was flying into other people and the brat, er, child was being a complete nuisance. The mother finally intervened with an anemic "Logan, sweetie, don't bouce that inside" which the kid ignored. I rolled my eyes not at the ineffective discipline, but at the name. Logan?

What is logan, anyway? A berry, right? Or a shade of green. Which reminds me that about four years ago a friend of mine had a son. He liked the name Jake. Mother liked Hunter. Guess who won? Not long after the baby was born we all went out to dinner. All evening we were hearing from other tables "Hunter! Put that back!" "Hunter! Get down!" "Hunter! Don't bite your sister!"

My nominee for the winner in the "Name Your Kid Like a Porn Star" contest was a guy I saw chasing his daughter at a local kite festival...she darted off, he followed yelling "Asia! Asia Teal! Come back here..."

Here I must admit...my given first name is not that common (in the 60's, when I was born, my name was shared by less than 0.3% of the females born the same decade. And the 60's were the heyday...it didn't make the top 1000 names in the 1940's and had dropped to less than 0.01% by the 1990's.) And I have found out quite by accident that my name is also used by porn stars, including one who also uses a name uncomfortably close to my middle name, too.

The Social Security Administration compiles lists of baby names from social security card applications, and you can check out the database on their web page. This is where I found the stats on my name, but there are lots of things to play with, like the top 5 names for a given year by state.

It is a cool use of our tax dollars, and I'm not being facetious. If I had a kid coming I'd be spending a lot of time on that site, finding a name that wasn't so common she'd be one of five in the class, but one that wouldn't make anyone smirk at me when I was yelling at her in the grocery store.

Posted by Nic at July 15, 2003 05:53 PM