What Your Name Says About You
January 14, 2015 § Leave a comment
The article linked here talks about how naming conventions change over time, and how the tendency of parents to favor “unique” or unusual names increases as cultural values increasingly favor individualism over community. It also touches on the perils of giving a child a name which is too unusual, which ties in to lower rates of income for the groups most likely to have “unique” names (i.e., girls, lower socio-economic classes, ethnic minorities).
From the article:
More than half of parents polled last year said they favor unusual names, which is up nearly 10 percent from 2013, according to the parenting site BabyCenter.com. And this trend is only expected to grow, say researchers, who’ve found that more than ever, baby naming is tethered to a narcissistic urge to be different.
. . . “The interesting paradox is although people still prefer more common names, parents are less likely to give more common names,” Twenge says. “They place more emphasis on uniqueness.”
The Art of Literary Nomenclature 
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