Female names vs. male names

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Haertig

Haertig

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I find this article interesting:

https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/10-baby-names-dying-america-mildred-pauline#&_intcmp=fnhpriver_21
Of the ten names they list as "going extinct", nine of those are female names and one is a male name. (I say this without shame, and without fear of offending the non-binaries.)

At the bottom of the article there is a short paragraph of the ten most popular names. Nine of those are male names and one is a female name. The exact opposite of above.

The US birth rate of males vs. females is about equal (very slightly tilted towards more males). So the "going extinct" and "most popular" name trends are not due to differing birth rates. I'm guessing that there are simply more different female names than male names to start with? Maybe guys just keep recycling the same old names and girls have more variety in their names? I can indeed attest to my three man organic chemistry lab group in college containing David, David and David. That was kind of embarrassing actually. We looked at each other and said "We suck!"

Maybe a bigger name pool for females dilutes how many times any specific name will be chosen, making it more likely that one of them will be picked off for extinction? And the smaller pool of male names means that each name will be used more often, so it artificially appears "more popular"?

Anyway, this article just seemed kind of intriguing to me.
 
RidgeRunner said:
A little off topic, but, I knew some people with the last name of Lear. They named their daughter Shanda.
(think chandelier)
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Yeah, when parents give names like that to their children, they must have forgotten the bullying they went through in school, when I worked for the local school district there was a girl named Candy Barr and I often wonder why would parents do a thing like that, knowing what their kid would have to go through, to me it seems I went through enough with Jerome as a first name, these days I've come to like it because I've never met another Jerome in my lifetime and it was my dad's middle name.
 
RidgeRunner said:
A little off topic, but, I knew some people with the last name of Lear. They named their daughter Shanda.
(think chandelier)
Click to expand...
My aunt went to school with Rosie Butts. A friend of mine's last name was Aus. He swore he was going to name his kids Harry, Rosie, and Ophelia. He didn't.
 
I had an unusual talk with a woman at the checkout in a large grocery store, she had asked her daughter something and I had heard her say her daughters name that I did not clearly hear, so I asked her what here daughters name was and she told me it was Karma and indicated that it was because of her being the second daughter and that the first daughter was an easy birth and I said the second daughter was not so easy and therefore the name Karma and she said yes. The interesting thing that happened was that I just had one item and a guy in front of me had a full cart and he said go ahead and the woman I was talking to said, had she realized that I only had one item, she would have let me ahead of her, but then she pulled a fast one and told the cashier to put my bottle of kombucha on her tab, I asked her what she did and she smiled and said nothing, I thanked her and realized that there are still good people out there and maybe wearing my Air Force veteran cap made a difference.
 
I won't be crying about some of those names going away. I view some of them as old fashioned.

The name Emma is on the list. I had a great aunt named Emma. She was not the nicest person, so the name was always one that I didn't care for, associating it with her. I have known some children named Emma though.

In my genealogy research, I learned that in Bohemia, now Czechia, you were allowed to name your children from a list of names that had been approved. This may have been true in other places in Europe as well. I believe that they were Christian names. I had a gggg grandfather named Waclaw. The W, as pronounced in the German way, was pronounced as a V, so his named was pronounced as Vaclav. Men who came to America with that name, and my g aunt Emma's brother Vaclav did, frequently Anglicized their names. Vaclav changed his name to James and was called Jim. Mary Magdalene was an approved name. My g grandparents had a daughter who died around the age of two. The family had always called her Lottie, but in looking in the old Bohemian records, I saw her birth and death records naming her as Mari Magdalena. This was in a time when spelling was not as consistent as it is now.

I think it is important to give children names that will not have them bullied.
 
Spikedriver said:
OK, this isn't a real name, but when I was tending bar at a country music nightclub back in the 90s, I heard a guy introduce himself to a drunk young lady. He said his name was "Buster Highman".

If you don't get it at first, say it real slow...
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We had a shop supervisor named Hyman and he always said he would name a son buster.
I bought a fishing license from a young girl whos name tag said Sundi Spooner.
I asked her if that was really her name and she said yes. I said your Mom had a since of humor and she had no idea what I meant.
 
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I come from a family of weird old names. And then I married someone with a funny last name that I get jokes about all the time. Around here, the wife's name is second to her husbands. So my name is my husband's first name and my first name. No AND in between, it's like one word. And typically, the middle name is just an initial. And it's from the father's first name. So my great grandpa was Shem Yoder, his son Enos was Enos S. Yoder. The S being from the name Shem. His son's were Melvin E, Homer E, etc....
 
Cabin Fever said:
I think about half the names used for kids nowadays are either made up or alternative spellings of a common name.
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My thought exactly. Do names even matter anymore? Seems like you can make up whatever you want, and nobody cares, at least the adults don't. Maybe the kids at school make fun.

True story, I went to High School with a family whose last name was Kane. They had two daughters, Dorie and, you guessed it, Candy.

I remember Megan Kelly who was with Fox News at the time following election results. One of the candidates was Chrystal Ball. Megan Kelly commented "I'm not joking."
 
When I was in high school there were three guys whose first and middle names were the same as movie stars, Gary Merrill, Rex Allen, and John Wayne. All noted for their westerns.
 
My sister told me about a book title, The Yellow River, by I.P. Standing. I’m sorry, I think I have said that before.
I know families who have named their children, most had 4, all beginning with the letter A.
My first and middle are my grandmothers’ middle names. Three of my kids’ first names are Hebrew; no, I’m not.
Nothing new wave on my kids’ names. A couple are ancestral family names. None are interchangeable male/female names.
 
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All Eskimo names are gender neutral. When someone dies the next child born is given that name. Along with that name comes all the family associations. It is a regular occurrence for an adult to call an infant, even a girl, grandfather.
 
Some nick names around here are funny. Stingy Dan. He was stingy. Sherfy Joe was a relative of mine, and I asked what Sherfy meant, and was told that it was because he was acting like a Sherf. (a sherrif). My grandpa was Buck Enos. He was courting my grandma, waiting for her to come out of the evening Sunday singing, hiding behind a bush. The man of the house heard a rustle, and asked who was the young buck out there hiding. So he was called Buck Enos.
 
Caribou said:
All Eskimo names are gender neutral. When someone dies the next child born is given that name. Along with that name comes all the family associations. It is a regular occurrence for an adult to call an infant, even a girl, grandfather.
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In my Czech genealogy research, a similar practice happened, but it was relative to the death of infants. My gg grandfather had two sisters born who were named Barbara. One was around 2 years old when she died, and then a baby girls was born shortly after that, and named, Barbara!
 
Cabin Fever said:
I think about half the names used for kids nowadays are either made up or alternative spellings of a common name.
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My daughter's name is exceptionally rare. My ex wife adapted it from the Norwegian language. She said it had to be something that was completely unique. I didn't like it at first, but it grew on me. Every time I introduce my daughter to an adult woman, they say, "Oh, that's a beautiful name!" But, I would never share it with anyone online, because as of last year there were exactly zero other people in the US with the same name. A creeper could look her up just by typing in her first name...
 
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