Onomastics

Onomastics, how we name our children, has been a source of fascination to me since college, when I read a brilliant essay illustrating that weird and misspelled named are less frequent in pedobaptist cultures.  The thought was that having to run the baby's name past a minister or priest created a social pressure toward tradition and respectability. Black preachers could spell "Isaiah" correctly, but they didn't get the chance to put their oar in early, as the white Methodist or Presbyterian preacher across the street did. In the very next essay in my college text, I learned that Puritans would use names over, which very few other cultures did.  If Ephraim died in the year he was born, the next son was often named Ephraim.  Most cultures considered that bad luck, but Puritans thought more in terms of the whole family having a continuity extending forward.

My wife is Tracy.  The priest refused to baptise her with that name because there is no Saint Tracy. Her mother was a stubborn woman and was likewise immovable, but the priest went forward in command of the ceremony.  So if you meet my wife in heaven, her namecard might say Therese instead. At least one of my five sons will be unable to recognise their mother in heaven because of this.  Which will be uproarious. Relatedly, using "salmons" as a plural will also be an identifier of our group.  Drop over and say hello when you hear that.

Looking up an old post to create a link for a site that linked to me, I decided that my posts on onomastics over the years were so interesting that I would not single any out.  The whole batch is fun. Should I do a book of my best 300 posts, two per page? The idea is intriguing, and the title Assistant Village Idiot would certainly jump off the page at Amazon.  Yet my strength is not in 300 stunning posts, but in 1000 mid-range interesting and informative, maybe more. We all have to know who we are.

Note: In a post on my respect for the name "Oscar" years ago, Sam L was on board and had a clever response.  We have some continuity here.

Onomastics

Onomastics, or naming, is a topic of some fascination for me, and I have written about it often over the years. Some cultures require that children be named after some relative, others forbid that they take the name of someone still alive. I am named after my mother's brother.  Had I been a girl it would have been her sister, Cynthia. Some brands of puritans kept using a name for a child no matter how many of them died young, especially if they wanted to preserve the father's or a grandparent's name. Tracy's family uses Douglas as a middle name often, and the lore is that the Yorkshire family had lots of Scots ancestry and the name was passed down because of that. Scots and Borderers had a lot of exchange over the years, both angry and friendly, so it was not surprising when DNA confirmed this. In Romania and other cultures, people are called by their middle names, so my son John-Adrian (who now goes by JA or John) was Adrian Ionut, while Chris was Dorel Cristian until he was 14, and is still Cristi when he goes back. 

I started early on with this blog, and one of the things discussed have been pathological names. Crystal (and especially variants) had a long run in the 80s and 90s populating the caseloads of social workers, and Amber came later.  It was pronounced enough that I twice had social workers named Crystal immediately move to reassure me that they were okay and that they could be worked with. I was distressed when we visited England in the late 90s and I read an article describing how destrissed elementary school teachers were on learning their class had more than one Fiona.  I loved that name.  Still do. I'm glad the pathological mothers here didn't share that fondness.  There are plenty of nice people with names that somehow are shared with age mates that are terrors, but the patterns are pretty clear.

Here are some I have posted in the early years. I will probably group the later ones for another reposting in the future.

Changes in fashion since my era. I regularly had two or three David's in my classes, but no kindergarten has had one in years now.

Boy's names become girl's names, but no vice-versa.

Incredible stability of naming in English, now vanished. First names in English, 1200-2000. I should have included Aethelwulf and Eomund and the like. 

Some examination of both the trends since 1940 or so and why they occurred.

Freakonomics

I don’t see what the big deal is. This is supposed to be the ubercreative economist, asking brilliant questions and using powerful economic tools to reveal surprising things about the everyday world. But what Levitt does is the same thing Bill James and a dozen other sabermetricians do with baseball statistics. Historians like David Hackett Fischer do the same thing when they compares mortality tables, church membership rolls, and population demographics in colonial America. Sociologists and psychologists look for interesting proxy data or representative samples to answer their interesting questions about how people really think and act.

Levitt’s examples are particularly varied, and he seems to bite off large trunks of the truth at the first pass, suggesting that he is especially good at this. But there’s nothing new here. The book is interesting, and it will give you new perspectives on events around you, but a #1 NYTimes bestseller? How did that happen? Arnold Kling over at TCSDaily put up warning signals about this, and even gave a nice counterexample of an angle that Levitt overlooked and didn’t measure in his Freakonomic takedown of real estate agents abusing their inside information for their own benefit instead of yours. Similar slips occur throughout the book. On page 138, in discussing what causes criminality, Levitt assures us that single-parent families are a strong predictor; but by page 167, the intact family is claimed to have no effect on school success.

Well, sure, if you want to make a case that criminality and school success are unrelated, I suppose you could start from there. But in a discussion about what makes a perfect parent, you can’t just switch and say “We’re only going to measure kids’ test scores,” because most parents consider keeping their children away from criminal behavior to be an important part of upbringing.

Perhaps I have a slight resentment because I recently made observations about onomastics (that’s, uh, naming, thank you very much) and no one is citing me in best sellers, but is it really difficult to notice that boys’ names became girls’ names, but not the other way ‘round? I’ve been aware of it for almost four decades. I can’t be the only one. Whole chapters were devoted to onomastics in one of my college linguistics texts, and much of what Levitt reports breathlessly seems obvious to me. The names that rich people give their children become the names that middle class and then poor people give their children 10-20 years later. Especially true for girls. Ooh wow.

So how does Levitt get the rep as the Golden Boy of Economics, and send his book to millions of nightstands across America? I speculate:
1. Levitt and Dubner address some very sexy questions that people want to know the answers to – crime, abortion, gun control, school cheating, getting ripped off, racial bias.
2. They address them well. Not flawlessly, but interestingly, with soundish reasoning and good writing.
3. It includes fancy economics ideas like moral incentives and factor analysis, so you’ll know you’re reading a book by a certified smart person. And if you already knew about those things, then Levitt and Dubner reassure you how smart you really are, by referring to them like professional secrets.
4. Most writing by economists is really, really boring, so this looks like an easy way for the dilettante reader to break into the field.

Let me elaborate on that last one a bit. I took an anthropology class my senior year to fulfill a requirement, and learned a great deal about Meso-American economies. That’s about Olmecs, and Toltecs, and the improvement in maize (and that’s about all I remember thirty years later). For a final paper, I compared changes in pottery designs of several cultures. The central idea was that designs became more ornate in civilizations as they grew in strength, but became stylized before they reached the peak of their power. Stylization was thus revealed as something of a predictor that a civilization was reaching its peak. My data was so good that I must have selected it conveniently. Then I tried to relate the principle to (then) modern American culture, trying to detect if we were about to implode like Mayans.

Having been trained in English and Theater departments, let me assure you that this was a C+ paper. I was in no danger of flunking out, I didn’t need the grade, and a whirlwind 12 hour entering-the-library-to-finished-product paper was just fine for me. The paper got an A+. The professor read it out loud to the class as an example of what he was looking for. He asked if he could keep it to pass out to future classes. He encouraged me to consider graduate school in anthropology. Took my breath away. I could make no sense of this.

It was about two days later that I remembered how utterly deadly the style of writing in anthropology is. My writing skills, above-average but nothing world-beating, shone like Cortez’s helmet in the anthropology department. This effect is what is happening in Freakonomics. People want to know something about economics, but anything longer than 1000 words puts them to sleep. Levitt has gotten around that with cool topics, and Dubner seals the deal with snappy prose.

Recommendation: You will probably like this book just fine, and learn some interesting things. But if your hidden goal is to be able to find economics that is endurable to read, go over to Tech Central Station, or buy PJ O’Rourke’s Eat The Rich.

More Onomastics

Steve Sailer points out that the young golfers leading at the US Open aften 3 rounds are all "Generation Ǝn," that is, their names all end in that schwa-n sound: Jordan, Jason, Dustin, Brandon. Add in the rhyming Braydon, Jaydon, Graydon, Hayden, Peyton, and even Creighton; plus Justin, Ethan...it goes on forever among guys born in the 80's and beyond. There are girls' names that have that ending, but I think all are ones stolen from the boys, such at Jordan, Jaydon.  Madison is a tweener - the "o" is pronounced ins some versions, not in others. But recently the -a names have dominated among the girls: Sophia, Emma, Isabella, Olivia, Alexa, Michaela, Sarah, Hannah.  In the previous two generations the "-ee" sound was far more popular at the end: Kelly, Tracy, Dorothy, Shelly, Amy, Brittany, and even the -a names would become -ee names in nickname, such as Theresa/Terri, Barbara/Barbie, Rebecca/Becky.

The -Ǝn sound is not a common universal for boys' names, as far as I can tell. In fact, the -ee sound that girls used was a common ending for boys' names until recently: Kelly, Shirley, Leslie, Tracy, Terry, Jackie, Bobby. The -a sound, not so much for boys.  But the -a ending is a feminine ending in many languages in the world, common enough that Merritt Ruhlen and the other linguists who believe we can detect echoes from the original language of humans suggest that -a is one of the language universals that has been there for 50,000 years. Those of you who know foreign languages might reflect on whether that sound is feminine in the ones you know.

So mothers are reverting to so some deep association of -a with girl children that is old-fashioned in about as complete a sense as one can imagine. Why the schwa-n sound for boys comes from I don't know.

Dialect, and Social Signalling

A commenter at Steve Sailer's asked what they hell I meant by social signalling, in discussing language usage.  We have used the term often enough here that I have fallen into the assumption that I am being clear.  Let me make sure.

The dominant dialect in any language is often rather accidental.  The ruling class usually declares its dialect to be standard, officially or not.  Most frequently, this is the dialect from around the capital city.  If you come from the provinces, your charming accent and phrasing, which sounds like the Only True Frubish to you, will brand you as a stupid person.

That's the simplest form.  In actual countries there may be competing dialects, or a particular brand may be considered especially well-suited for a certain type of person, such as a preacher to the masses, or an international trader.  It can get complicated - no need to go into that here.

In America, standard English tracks central Ohio pretty well, at least as I was taught in the 1970's.  What we consider accentless has spread far enough by mass media that many regional accents are barely noticeable.  Both Portlands speak a similar dialect*. Those regions or groups which retain identifiable accents sometimes suffer under stigma.  In America, we can get assertive rather than apologetic about this and make the stigma swing the other way for our own purposes.  Obama was being held at arms length by much of the black community until he verged into mild black dialect - most famously on Oprah; newscasters with NYC accents are not going to get jobs in some places, and certainly not in Chattanooga.

The most prestigious dialect in America varies by listener.  The more one is a reader of older material, the more one likes a speaking style that tracks written standards.  This style uses slight archaisms, pronounces consonants (because the written form is present in the mind), keeps track of implied punctuation, and uses slang for effect rather than naturally.  None of us has a speaking style that is all that close to written English, actually.  But some dialects are much closer than others.

Less formal, folksier dialects are preferred by a great many Americans, including some extremely well-educated ones.  In Australia as well, there is a tradeoff of sounding too educated - not because education is not prized, but in the subtle twists of social communication, veering too far into formal, written dialect raises the question whether you might not be truly egalitarian, truly Australian.

A young African-American man from mid Long-Island was admitted today, and his accent mixed New York and black styles.  He said cooffee, he said breave (for breathe).  His vocabulary seemed large enough and expression clear enough that he is likely above average intelligence. But outside of his region or race he will certainly sound strange, and probably less intelligent. If he wished to live elsewhere or enter many professions, he would have to learn an American dialect closer to Ohio white, using his familyspeak selectively or for effect.  This partly true for all of us - I am quite aware that my dialect has changed slightly over the years - but more for some than others.

He is a native English speaker, and a linguist would regard his dialect as being "as good" - whatever that means - as North Georgian, Rural Vermont, or Upper Peninsular.  But using dialect signals who we are, or want to appear to be.  Why do African Americans give their children more unique or eccentric names, in contrast to earlier onomastics of naming after famous people?  Likely, to show solidarity with the black community and independence from the implied one-down-ness of imitation.  Why do New Yorkers keep that accent they know everyone else hates?  Because they consider much of the hatred to be envy, and want to identify with The City.

Not splitting an infinitive marks one as trained in a certain era with certain aspirational values and attention to detail.  No one does it naturally, it can only be learned by attention and practice.  I no longer worry about it (much), which signals something about me.

*Yes, they might have because of founder effect anyway, but really - not really.

Changes in First Names in English, 1200 - 2000

In 1300, the most common names in English for boys were John, William, Robert, Richard, and Thomas. In 1940, the most common names were James, Robert, John, William, and Richard. Thomas had slipped to 8th. That's not a lot of change in 640 years. The streak wasn't completely uninterrupted. Charles, Henry, George, and few others would slip into the top 5 for a century or so, but the top 5 never fell very far.

The most common names for girls in 1300 were Mary, Ann, Elizabeth, Jane, and Margaret. In they 1880's they were Mary, Anna, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Emma. A few names like Alice or Sarah would pop in, but that list was quite stable as well.

In around 1800 in England, about a quarter of the boys were named John, and more than a fifth of the girls were named Mary. When one considers that having multiple progeny was more the norm then, it would seem that just about every family had a John and a Mary.

Interestingly, the names had changed somewhat in the 13th Century. Before the Conquest, things like Radulf and Drogo were more common, along with the Johns and Roberts. But after the Normans took over, the Saxon names fell out of favor socially and French names moved up.

In America, these male and female names continued strongly in Virginia. New England and the Mid-Atlantic states began using other names, usually Biblical, but the names above continued strong. Not until about 1800 do we start to see new female names pop onto the lists, and the male names do not start changing until a century later.

Female names have turned over more rapidly since then, as we discussed in this post from a year ago. An excerpt:

Names given to boys have been more stable over time. Michael became the most popular name for boys over fifty years ago, and has been #1 most years since. David supplanted it for a few years in the 1960's and Jacob has pushed it into 2nd in the 21st C, but that's a very long run. In that time, Mary, Lisa, and Jennifer have each enjoyed runs of about 10-15 years atop the list. None of these have even been in the top 10 since 1992, when Jessica rose to the top, quickly replaced by Emily.

Wikipedia covers the most common names for 1880 - present, which is fun thing to browse through.

It is also interesting to ponder Pathological Names, which I also wrote about months ago. John Derbyshire over at National Review Online has also weighed in on the subject.

This all comes up because the new grandchild will be either Benjamin or Emily, so I am thinking about onomastics again.

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.

2010 Posts, Linguistics

Some of these still look interesting.

The most-likely origin of the use of the word wicked to mean "very."

The long trail of shifts in meaning for the word silly from "blessed" to well, "silly" as we use it now. With music by Maddy Prior and June Tabor

Onomastics, the study of naming, has always been a favorite of mine. 

American Dialects starting with Hans Kurath during the Depression and including Rick Aschmann's full North American dialect map.

 

Cultural Continuity - Close Examples

Rambling.  Feel free to ramble in the comments yourself.  I am interested in the folkways, the patterns of continuity among your friends and family, and whether they fit anything I have described.

Having children increases your tendency to stay in some traditional culture. You aren’t going to experiment with foods so much, you are going to stick with things that produce fewer arguments. Two people coming together will bring separate food folkways with them, so there will be some newness, but the person doing most of the cooking – likely she – will serve things children are known to like, such as what her mother served her. Tracy and I have shared the cooking, but few of our standby’s are from my mother’s repertoire, but from her mother's. My married sons cook very little, so my granddaughters eat from their mothers’ heritage. Two of the unmarried sons eat very adventurously now, though they didn’t as children. They go out or take out food, they have traveled more, when they cook there is little or nothing from their childhoods. 

Traveling. Moving to a new place has a liberalizing tendency, staying near The Old Folks At Home is conservatizing, if that’s a word. The act of cutting off from a location allows you to pick and choose what you will bring with you. You can live in a different kind of climate, in a different kind of house, go to a different church, take a job you wouldn’t find at home.  People do cling tenaciously to some of those chosen folkways – colonies sometimes preserve customs long discarded in the home country – but the point is you chose them. As it is more of a project to move with children, people hesitate more over that. Having children and living near your own parents, you hear more about your own childhood, and the continuity of traits.

This does raise cart-and-horse questions.  I left New England to go hours away for college, while my brother went to Plymouth State.  Yet I came back to New Hampshire, while he left halfway through to go to California. He may have carried his anti-traditionalism with him rather than picked it up there. And, neither of us kept either of our parent's cultures - I embraced older western culture, especially a British Christian one, with significant European Jewish flavoring.  As my wife is also an Anglophile, we self-designed a nuclear family culture not especially recognisable to either of our sets of parents.

Onomastics. My stepsiblings chose names very typical for prep New England from 1975-1995, and they are very traditional in a way different than we are. Tracy's brother chose Celtic names for his children, yet one more variation on hearkening back. We chose Biblical names with family middle names. Our granddaughter's middle name is Adelaide, which is both my mother's middle name and the original version of her mother's name, Heidi. My other brother's children have names that connect to popular culture, not any history. Among our friends, their dozen or so children had very standard names, their dozen or so grandchildren very unusual ones. Few of the weddings were in churches.

As for passing on trades or employment there is almost none of it, unless one counts a high percentage in both generations of women staying home with children (though part-time work is frequent), and of some home schooling. Some seem to have picked up variations of work that their grandparents did. We'll see what happens with the following generation of unusually-named children.

Onomastics

There is a particularly foolish article about baby names at The Daily Beast. (I know. I followed a link from a usually trustworthy source. Really.) The author is described as a "baby name expert." Sez who?

For hundreds of years, both boys and girls names were very stable. Girls were Mary, Anne, or Elizabeth, though Margaret, Alice, and Joan also got some play. 50% of females had one of those names. Over 50% of boys were John, Thomas, or William, with Robert and Richard in the second tier. By mid 20th C, Michael and David were perennial tops for boys, Mary, Linda, Susan, and Betty for girls. But the wheels were already turning. Girl names had more variation throughout the 20th C, but really picked up steam after WWII. The most common name changed every 15 years or so, from Mary to Lisa to Jennifer to Jessica. Now it changes every few years. The top 10 for boys in 1990 looked scarcely different from 1950, but are now starting to show the same turnover that the girls did a few decades ago.

What does it mean? Many things, and I won't even attempt to cover them all. And I will wildly overgeneralise, because we are speaking of trends, not individual decisions.

The stability of boys' names was meant to convey solidity and strength. Girls' names came to be regarded as something more decorative. In evangelical circles, Biblical names were big, so there were plenty of Rebeccas, Sarahs, and Rachels, but there was also a wide field for something more unusual. Roman Catholics insisted on a saint's name - my wife Tracy was actually baptised Therese. Paedobaptist traditions in general have been more conservative in naming. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson has long bemoaned the drive to unique names in the African-American community, attributing it to the breakdown of families and generational continuity. But this also results from the black churches being much less likely to practice infant baptism, a reality that long predates the last few decades of absent fathers.

More recently, parents have taken to giving their daughters some of the less-common boys' names, or English surnames with a rather aristocratic feel to them, such as Madison, Cameron, and Taylor. But far more common have been older female names, so long out of use that we cannot think of them as girls' names, but as women's names: Olivia, Sophia, Abigail, Isabella. Similarly, the new names for boys - Jacob, Alexander, Joshua, Ethan - are recognisable old names. These do not suggest continuity so much as approbation of tradition, which is somewhat different.

Families have less continuity, so it is hardly surprising that there is less of it in the names. Yet we still desire something of that hearkening back, and so pull names from the Old Testament, classical history, Victorian England, or the American West (Cody, Colt, Dakota). We are more fragmented now, and while there still are top ten names every year, those ten represent a smaller overall percentage of the total - and the published lists have moved to top 25, then 50, and now 100.

In our family, the tradition of using Douglas as a middle name has held for at least five generations on my wife's side. Naming a first son for an uncle will go to three generations on my side if the new Wyman is a boy: David-David/Jonathan-Jonathan/Benjamin-Benjamin. We have had fewer girls, so there has been less opportunity for tradition, but taking a middle name found in the family tree has some precedent. My grandaughter's middle name is Adelaide, not only her great grandmother's middle name (she hated it, BTW), but a form of her mother's name, Heidi.

It is a continuity, not so emphatic as Junior or III, but similar to the custom in many cultures of naming after a grandparent or great-grandparent.

Best of May 2007

American Productivity. I must really like this one.

Thoughts on the exit of Cindy Sheehan. Still vaguely pertinent now.

Conservative shoes. I ask again

Oppressing nations cease having children Perhaps it’s the humiliation. Also, why you don’t want to live forever. Related: Moral deterioration

Anything worth doing is worth doing badly

Remember The Secret? AVI says not so much

The Last Gift of Mary Magdalene

My recent post on Onomastics? More here.

An exchange of posts on young adult books.
Sexism in Narnia
Ben’s Books For Boys, Books for Girls at his site, and
Female Characters in Heroic Fantasy

My thoughts on abstinence-only sex ed

Another reason Robert Fulghum is dangerous

Obligatory post on linguistics and word etymologies

The unconscious equating of capitalism with selfishness

Onomastics

Just a list of boy names that have become girl names. As you can see, this has been going on for some time. Each new one always sounds strange and inappropriate to me, but apparently we get used to it fast enough.

And no, they never go in the other direction. What the baby-name pages call androgynous or unisex names are merely names switching from male to female.

Leslie
Terry
Tracy
Beverly
Kelly
Shirley
Ashley
Dana
Jordan
Jamie,
Casey
Whitney
Sydney
Florence
Lindsey
Hillary

There's a strong tendency for the -y and -ly names to switch over for girl use. It is clearly more acceptable for a girl to have a boyish name than a boy to have a girlish one. There are a few possible explanations, but I lean toward the idea that masculine names often have higher status in terms of strength and solidity.

Onomastics

I’m thinking the name “Oscar” should be poised for a comeback.  It’s masculine, it’s Nordic, it’s far enough out of fashion to come back.  It doesn’t have the sound of a name the girls would steal – there are two markers for that, either a long “e” (Leslie, Kelly, Keenan) or previous use as an English-sounding surname (Taylor, Madison, Quincy) – so parents can feel more confident about using it.

It works for a little boy, boy, older boy, man.  What’s not to like?  Okay, unless you just don’t like the name Oscar.

Onomastics

Sarah has not been in the top ten girl's names the last two years. I wonder if a late surge will bring it in this year. We likely won't get a really good handle on how popular it is in evangelical circles until six years from now, when they enter Christian schools and homeschooling groups, but church nursery workers should get a good early reading on it.

Of course, Sarah was a pretty common name in evangelical (and Jewish) circles already. Bristol will likely take a dive in the standings - evangelical moms may like her but not want to push their luck. We'll see how Willow and Piper do. I don't imagine Track and Trig are going to crack the top 100 boy's names, though.

There might be an upsurge in Baracks among African-Americans and complete lefties, but I also doubt that John and Joe are going to do any better than usual.

Highest-Traffic Posts #41-45

Christian-as-Identity Part II. I don't know why Part I and Part III got only one-tenth the traffic. March 2019.

Changes In First Names In English 1200-2000. The interesting point is, they didn't change much from 1300-2000. I think half the traffic for my onomastics posts is me going back to look at them myself. The subject fascinates. May 2007

Is Alcohol Better For You Than Exercise?  You can see why this one attracted traffic.  May 2018.

Cultural Appropriation. The real kind.  I discuss the move "A Wrinkle in Time," March 2018.
 
Extreme Anti-Catholicism. It had good comments then, and might be worth another look now.  Does anyone see this type of anti-Catholicism anymore? June 2007