Saturday, November 02, 2013

Onomastics - The Women's Names You Will Be Hearing

I was looking up Kyle's pal Michele Tremblay, who is one of the top female HS soccer players in the country, to see what is being said about her nationally.  I didn't find much of that, but I did find a list of the 150 top players in the class of 2014.  Female soccer player's names are a good proxy for the most fashionable names for driven, upwardly-mobile girls, wouldn't you think? It will slant a tad to the athletic and masculine types, as opposed to the writing/artistic, math & science,  and music cohorts who will also have their say in ruling us, yet I think the list is likely to be representative.

The big winner?  The many variations of Alex.  There are in fact a disproportionate number of A-names, with the many Abby's and Allysons added in.  The continued fashionableness of variant spellings of names continues to irritate me as pure affectation.  But this seems to be the culture we have, and mothers across America clearly disagree with me.

Notice also how few have hyphenated surnames.  I would have expected more.

2 comments:

Dubbahdee said...

Dayvid
Daffyd
Daouid
Daphed

How about hyphenated first names?

Day-vid
Dae-veed
Deef-foud

I don't know why none of these have caught on.

Anonymous said...

Just checked the Social Security Administration statistics of earlier this year. It has three versions of Alex in the top 100 no other name has that. It also features 21 A-names which seems like the most common initial letter.

http://baby-names.familyeducation.com/popular-names/girls/