B4
B
KLMNO
SophiaNoah
Payton
The
O
ChloeEmilyNathan
John Amelia
Jacob Alexander
Olivia
Isabella
Owen
Andrew
Mary
baby name arms race
Our quest to be unique makes us all sound alike.
BIGSTOCKPHOTO
The second big change came courtesy of Michael
by Laura Wattenberg
n Friday, the Social Security Adminis- tration announced that Jacob and Emily were the top baby names of the decade. These classics may seem like reassuring signs of continuity across the generations. Don’t believe it for a second. Over the past generation, the way we name
babies has changed radically. Look through the rest of the top 100 names of the
decade, and you will find names that were essentially unknown a generation ago, such as Brooklyn and Ne- vaeh (“heaven” backward). You will find formerly exotic names that have become commonplace (Xavier, Aali- yah) and formerly male names that have become female (Addison, Riley). On the boys’ list, you’ll find six different names rhyming with Aidan. But what you won’t find are the English classics Edward, Margaret, George and Anne. In 2009, even Mary — the most popular name in the history of the English language — fell out of America’s top 100 for the first time. The new variations, more than Jacob and Emily, are the names that define this era, an era marked by an un- precedented desire to give our children names that are different, even rare. We’re all in this battle against popularity together, whether we realize it or not. I’ve lost count of the parents who have told me that they just happen to have a taste for names that aren’t too common. Rich and poor, black and white, red state and blue state, we’re all bound by a shared desire to be noth- ing like one another. Baby names are a heartfelt expression of parents’ deepest hopes for their children. This makes them a kind of fossil record of Americans’ thoughts, values and dreams at a given point in time. You can see it with spe- cific names, such as Liberty, which spiked in 1918 (the World War I armistice), 1976 (the bicentennial) and 2001 (the Sept. 11 attacks). Names didn’t always go in and out of style, though. In England, John, Mary, James, Elizabeth and the other royal favorites dominated for centuries. But in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, in a world of newly mobile populations and mass communication, name fashions bloomed. Victorian ideals of womanhood swept in flo- ral and gem names for American girls, such as Lily and Opal; a pre-WWI Germanic fad gave us a generation of Gertrudesand Hermans. In the 1960s, a new cultural emphasis on individu-
ality started us down the path we’re on now. More and more, parents wanted their children’s names to stand out, not fit in. Fewer and fewer children were given names in the top 25, and as the years went on, the No. 1 name in the country represented fewer and fewer ba- bies. (While the ’70s powerhouse Jennifer seems ultra- common today, it never came close to the heights of earlier No. 1 names John and Mary. As for Jacob and Emily, they wouldn’t have even cracked the top 10 in John and Mary’s heyday.) Then, in the mid-1990s, two forces turbocharged the
dramatic diffusion of American baby names that we’ve seen over the past decade. The first was the Internet. Online life altered parents’ basic concept of name indi- viduality. People started to think about names in the context of unique usernames and e-mail addresses. A century ago, one Amelia Jenkins might live a few towns from another Amelia Jenkins, and they would neither know nor care. But on the Web, we’re all next-door neighbors. Prospective parents of an Amelia Jenkins now type the name into Google or Facebook and freak out. They find dozens of Amelia Jenkinses. The name is “taken.”
Shackleford, an actuary in the Social Security Adminis- tration who in 1997 took it upon himself to tally up and publish online a list of the most common names on newborns’ Social Security number applications. In past generations, parents were left to guess (often unsuc- cessfully) at name trends and popularity. Now, there is an official ranking. The result of all this has been a sort of reverse arms
race, with parents across the country desperate to make sure that their chosen name doesn’t come out too near the top. Half a century ago, 39 percent of all babies born in this country were given a name in the top 25. Today that number is down to 16 percent. The trend cycle is speeding up, too, as parents patrol for the new and the different, staying alert not just to a name’s current popularity but also to which way it is trending. Names rise fast, but they also fall fast. Miley/Mylee was one of the fastest rising names of 2007 and 2008; by 2009, it was one of the fastest fallers. In eras past, name choices were aimed at an audi- ence of family or community. We named babies after relatives, for instance, to honor them and to please those who loved them. Today, we leave the homages to middle names and approach naming more like an exer- cise in branding: We’re trying to position our new entry to give it the best possible advantage in life’s market- place. That means standing out. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to unique-
ness. We may like the idea of distinctive names, but our tastes are as alike as they ever were. Even parents with different name sensibilities are influenced by the same underlying name fashions:Vowels, especially long vow- els, are good — think Owen and Ava. The -n ending is also good, as in Kaitlyn and Mason. But clusters of con- sonant sounds are bad. (Sorry, Gertrude and Herman.) Most important, names common in your generation or your parents’ generation are out. If you live in a com- munity of educated, affluent, older parents where tradi- tional names still dominate, you might have missed the whole Mylee phenomenon. Yet even traditionalists in- creasingly insist on novelty, and this means digging into the archives. Your schools are surely full of tradi- tional names that were neglected in recent generations, such as Noah and Sophia, and even faux antiques such as Ava and Olivia, formerly uncommon names that (thanks to Ava Gardner and Olivia de Havilland ) sound more old-fashioned than they actually are. So what happens when the irresistible desire to be
different meets immovably similar tastes? You end up with those six names that rhyme with Aidan in the top 100 names of the 2000s, and 38 of them, from Aaden to Zayden, in the top 1,000. The irony is that classic Eng- lish names such as George and Edward, Margaret and Alice — the names that used to be standard-bearers — all have distinctive sounds. They aren’t prisoners to phonetic fashion; each of them sounds instantly recog- nizable. Contemporary names, by contrast, travel in phonetic packs. More than a third of American boys now receive a name ending in the letter N. (In decades past, the most popular boys’ names were more evenly split between a number of endings, including D, L, S and Y.)
Call it lockstep individualism. Instead of a classroom
with two Williams and two Jameses, today we have one Aydin, one Jaden, one Braedon and one Zayden — not to mention a Payton, a Nathan and a Kaydence. In our rush to bless our children with uniqueness, we’ve creat- ed a generation that sounds more alike than ever.
editor@babynamewizard.com
Laura Wattenberg is the author of “The Baby Name Wizard” and the creator of the Web sites
www.babynamewizard.com and
www.namecandy.com.
PETE SOUZA/WHITE HOUSE
Obama confers with Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel last summer.
S AshleyebastianAva
Ethan
William
EliAbigail
Riley
Aiden
Logan
SUNDAY,MAY 16, 2010
Madison Kaylee
Mason
JIM YOUNG/REUTERS
President Obama, greeting troops at Camp Victory in Baghdad in April 2009, faced political, economic and foreign policy challenges in his first year in office.
The contradictions and crises of Year One
obama from B1
ly unpopular, collectively averted a de- pression in Obama’s first year, Alter con- vincingly argues. The president consid- ered his swift action a significant achievement. But he lamented how an angry public gave him little credit for avoiding “an abstract ‘counterfactual’ ” economic meltdown. Obama’s perception of the tension be-
tween the news media and the White House is particularly revealing. Although “Saturday Night Live” satirized a star- struck press, the president and his aides have often scorned the 24-7 cable news culture as a noxious circus that corrodes civility and sti- fles civic-minded debates about policy. While Obama vowed to bring change to Washington, his administra- tion’s anti-media bent is more in keeping with the Clinton and Bush White Houses than a sharp break. The book also reveals the
gap between Obama’s image as a great or- ator and his flagging efforts to communi- cate his policies lucidly. While his “hope and change” mantra proved a highly ef- fective campaign message in 2008, “he sometimes needed help connecting with the average person” as president, Alter writes. Obama loathes sound bites and “talking points.” His “diffidence toward cogency,” however, has provided an open- ing for his critics, who ably cast his subtle domestic and foreign policies in a harsh light.
Communicating a broader vision for his presidency also proved a nettlesome and elusive first-year task. Obama argued that smart policies and a longer-term “new foundation” based on systemic health-care changes, energy independ- ence and education reform would be the basis for 21st-century growth — yet a catchy phrase and a consistent, repetitive theme were missing, and his vision never took flight. His White House lost control of the message on bailouts, health care and jobs. Ironically, a brilliant orator who has been likened to Ronald Reagan en- dured one of the rougher presidential communication debuts in modern times.
The familiar images of Obama — the
left says he’s overly pragmatic; the right, a dangerous radical — evaporate in Alter’s analysis. He aptly calls Obama a “prudent gambler.” When his politically savvy chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “begged him” not to tackle health-care reform first, Obama overrode his advice and that of his senior staff members. He felt morally impelled to pursue the late senator Ted Kennedy’s cause, didn’t want to go small by pushing for “school uniforms” (a dig at Bill Clinton) and concluded that Year One was the time to fight the hardest bat- tle of all. He was “all alone” in that decision.
Obama also chafed at the “insubordination from the Pentagon” in the form of leaks designed to pressure him to increase troop levels in Af- ghanistan. He
“dressed
down” military leaders and ultimately agreed to insert 30,000 additional troops there, while committing to withdraw in mid-2011 — an- other sign, in Alter’s view, of
the prudent gambler.
Obama appears in these pages as a skilled executive leader, a first-rate mind on policy, and occasionally more adept at the ideas and substance than the political style of the modern presidency.He is seen having difficulty escaping “the bubble” and anticipating how the politics will un- fold on a given issue. The book is not without a few flaws. It has, as Alter himself suggests, an un- finished tenor. It’s impossible to know whether, for example, Obama’s health- care law, economic bailouts or outreach efforts to Muslims worldwide will ulti- mately bear fruit. And Alter’s under- standably heavy reliance on unnamed sources and interviews with Obama and his close friends and White House aides means that his book lacks the perspective of Obama’s most sophisticated first-year critics.
Still, “The Promise” is an illuminating window into Obama’s tenure so far. Al- ter’s deeply reported and analytically ar- resting book takes Obama’s story in sub- tler and more contradictory directions than it has gone before.
bookworld@washpost.com
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