Flutterby™! : How popular was your name?

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How popular was your name?

2006-02-07 23:17:34.643663+00 by ziffle 6 comments

Poor Arnold - but Cornelius is coming back!

http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-07 23:40:21.528631+00 by: Dan Lyke

Wow that's cool. Especially tracking things like slang, see the graph of "Dick", for instance, and some of the more extreme trends, for instance "Fonda" as a given name.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-08 02:03:04.503888+00 by: Diane Reese

Fun. I've seen this before, and it's sort of weird: all the interesting names in my extended family and all the names I like (and considered using for my kids) are either waaaaay down the list of populars (saving one that's just barely in the Top 200), or fell off the Top 1000 entirely by the 1990s. I guess I'm just a name throw-back. (Warren, Stuart, Walter, Lowell, Phyllis, Charlotte, Marjorie, Loretta, Lucille... all gone from the list, pretty much, and all melifluous to my ear. Oh yeah, and "Diane" just barely squeaks into the 900s, heh.) But people are weird about names anyway.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-08 14:32:57.815721+00 by: meuon [edit history]

Thats a heck a nice data visualization method. Very Very Kewl.

Thor, Saturn, all the classic names are not being used.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-08 15:14:21.815315+00 by: ziffle

As I get older, I find I dislike all the names that were popular recently - I like the old names. Cornelius, Hector etc.

New names like Justin, Jason, etc reflect some feminist version of suitable emasculated male names.

Some names like Adolf dropped off completely(!). Others like Mary are classics.

#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-08 15:41:25.953059+00 by: ebradway

Is it just me, or that not the most hilarious thing ever!

fizzle: you complain about new names reflecting "some feminist version of suitable emasculated male names" and the "classic" female name you mention (with implied preference) is Mary! The very icon of unattainable chasteness that all women feel compelled by men to attain!

#Comment Re: made: 2006-02-08 16:29:40.362585+00 by: Dan Lyke

Funny, my association with Jason is Greek mythology. And I'm not seeing any correlated trends with classically male names like, say, the names of the apostles. Matthew had a big peak in the '80s, Mark in the 60s, after a gentle decline into 1950 Luke has skyrocketed, and John has been waning through the history of the page.

I wish it went back further, "Cornelius" and "Cornelia" tracked each other fairly closely, even in absolute popularity.

I also wonder whether the apparent fall-off in the number of names isn't really that there are too many names getting lost in the cracks of statistical sampling. I didn't find any of the asian names that I tried, and I'll bet there are similar holes coming out of names in modern black culture.

And what's the sampled population?