> Surprisingly, the same pattern held in the opposite direction. Of the 12 names that moved toward boys, 9 shifted mainly because fewer girls were receiving them, rather than because more boys were. In other words, whichever way a name moved, the biggest change usually came from girls.
This is consistent with the observation that girl's names are more dynamic.
My son is named after his grandfather, and it's an overly common name in English (American and British). Definitely a top 3 most common for last several centuries
Also, IV is really quite rare for boys too. Junior still super common.
How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?
On some forms in the US, it's listed as a suffix. Some agencies enforce it, others do not (SSA does not, for example). And colloquially, when"Senior" dies, the son often stops using "Junior" (though that's not a legal change).
UK, Can, and AUS are similar, but not exactly the same as the US. And NSW in AUS complicates matters by outright prohibiting roman numberals are Jnr/Snr suffixes. Mexico has more restrictions due to the mothers-last-name, fathers-last-name naming convention.
Personally, I dig the Nordic and Arabic "x, son of y, son of z, son of..." patterns.
Long obsolete except in Iceland.
I won’t forgot when my small child clarified that I was born in 19 something not 18 something, two equally remote times to him.
On the list my middle name was listed as a name going from male to female - I think the first time I have seen anything about this name out in print in public.
Having a list of "allowed" names implies another list of "disallowed" names. I am not aware (including names with non 7-bit ASCII characters) of any such list of names that aren't legally allowed to be used.
I'd note that the artist formerly known as Ƭ̵̬̊ legally changed their name to that symbol here in my "presumably English-speaking" country.
I am not aware of any such restrictions where I live. Perhaps it's just where you do?
Ƭ̵̬̊'s legal name is not Ƭ̵̬̊ because government systems can't process that symbol he calls his name. It's not illegal to say your name is Ƭ̵̬̊ but that's not actually your name as the government sees it.
Which specific statute forbids this? I am not aware of any.
>Ƭ̵̬̊'s legal name is not Ƭ̵̬̊ because government systems can't process that symbol he calls his name. It's not illegal to say your name is Ƭ̵̬̊ but that's not actually your name as the government sees it.
Actually, Ƭ̵̬̊' changed their name (again) a long time ago -- long before they died.
That said, Once again, which specific statute says that?
You're making claims without providing evidence. Or as the (no so young any more) kids say, "pix, or it didn't happen."
No rush, I'll wait.
But your name might get mangled in some states if it doesn’t fit, same as it might in the US if some system doesn’t properly handle, e.g., multiple middle names or special punctuation.
My first and middle names are John and Richard. A couple of times on trips to the US people have read my initials as 'Jr'. Very surprising the first time! Has never happened to me in the UK.
And it's not even part of his legal name.
> How does that work when they’re 60 with grandkids?
They get called "grandpa" like everyone else with grandchildren.
Sorry to bring up race but it’s the US and the SES is too highly correlated to ignore these in a data conversation and we all do things slightly differently roughly by race/background, there’s no monoculture in the US
I guess latest wave would be “Techno Mechanicus” or whatever the other silly names we heard lately.
I used rich as shorthand placeholder of blue blood, noble, famous and rich. Not everyone who is rich is noble and noble doesn’t mean they are rich.
(There was a brief period where my sister was dating someone who went by J.T. The initials were something of an effort to obscure his name, James III.)
I know a lot of people that just go by their middle names in this scenario. Even my brother was named like this and the intent from the beginning was he’d go by his middle name.
I think maximum pompousness goes to those that make sure you know they’re a third or fourth. If I meet you at a cocktail party and will never meet you again, don’t introduce yourself as William H Gates the Third, just say Bill.
Curiously, in the last few months in the U.S. I've met a Tamar and an Esther, both women given family names that were drawn from the bible.
Funny enough, I think it’s common for the female middle name to be a mom/grandma/aunt name.
Is it a specific cultural thing I wonder
It's apparently not an uncommon tradition in several areas of the world to either have either the first or middle name be shared, and then a unique name for the unmatched one (e.g. John Alan Doe, John James Doe, John Matthew Doe - Alan John Doe, James John Doe, Matthew John Doe).
My son was born in a country with doesn't write those in a birth certificate. When we went back, guess what -- they still added it by deriving it from my name.
Not every society wants to be modern.
Modern society cuts family ties which is a lot of times not so great, but on the other hand it saves lots of people from abusive relationships.
Once you can leave abusive parents or siblings, whole world of opportunities opens. Then again on the other hand not everyone can deal with such a freedom.
Yet still I am personally supportive of modern approaches where people can choose their destiny and not being tied to a family legacy.
I'd rather see the name of the father be stuck to the kid so if he's a failure, everyone knows who failed him.
Therefore, you just invite confusing answers and useless discussions in your reply.
I consider my values to be very centrist and common sense, however every year i learn more and more that what i consider to be common sense isnt very common.
This level of condescension paired with an equivalent level of ignorance is astounding, especially as the only reason I asked you was because I wanted to steelman your position, but it was so vague that this was hard to do.
I originally asked if you meant the nuclear family with your statement "why humans organized the way they did for millennia before we decided to change everything.", because I wanted to know if you are aware that the nuclear family as a dominant structure is _a lot_ younger than that.
But in another reply, you said that you meant to talk about the nuclear family and the raising of children by the whole tribe. These are very different from each other, and that's why I asked you to clarify. Now I know that you just wanted to express a general feeling of regret that things aren't the way you image them to have been in the past, and your comment didn't contain any real content besides that, I can move on with my life.
Dunno about other cultures, but in Poland it was very common until relatively recently to refer to wives/daughters by a suffixed first name (not surname) of the husband/father. If Mary Higgins married Jack Smith, from then on she'd be known as Jackowa, and their daughter Betty would be called Jackówna. This is distinct from naming children after their ancestors. The custom predates surnames by hundreds of years, but served essentially the same role of tying the women to their men.
So while there is a bias towards mother custody of the kids (around 2/3), there is still 1/3 of the kids where it is not the case.
Also, not having full custody of kids doesn't mean the father is leaving completely from the kids life. More often than not the kids need to stay with one parent because job and cost of living forces them to be more regionally apart (only 37% of kids living in same town). That doesn't mean the father do not see the kids in the weekends/holidays nor contribute financially to study.
So the reality is way more nuanced than you make it out to be in a small comment.
Why do you frame it as only fathers can fail children? Or only men can do wrong? Women can pay for studies as well, and have just as much duty to their children.
Before the Acts of Union of 1707, England and Scotland were not united into one kingdom, but two kingdoms that shared the same king under a personal union.
Or both: the family names having been chosen originally from biblical names, but not continuing for that reason.
I'm a David, and there were many Davids in my University intake year, but I suspect that has less to do with the Bible and more to do with mothers of a certain age range having interests in the Davids Bowie or Essex (or both! - quite possible in my mother's case).
e.g. you have "toys" and "girl toys". "clothes" and "girl clothes" and such. It's not everywhere or everything but there is a trend.
It seems that people still don't realize that a good half of" femboys" are straight men who exclusively date women.
We really don’t.
And shouldn’t.
Why that is the case is another question.
In fact, you can almost prove it by bijective mapping to a subset. Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version (Juan->Juana, Carlos->Carla/Carlota, Manuel->Manuela, Adrián->Adriana, and so on... there are some exceptions, but not many) while the opposite is not true, there are plenty of common girl names without masculine version (Laura, Marta, Elena, Carmen, Sara, and many others).
There are also papers doing the actual stats and concluding that girl names are more diverse. No idea what the reason is.
Girls get flowers, gemstones, places, etc. while boys get old grandpa names.
Comrade Adam is keeping an eye on the lists and is posting highlights whenever new names are approved: https://kammeratadam.dk/keyword/godkendtefornavne
A name that really begs to be screamed out loud
What? The state gets to choose which name can you freely give your child?
People here find it very strange (insane even) that in US you can name your child Apple, North West or X Æ A-Xii.
(I don't have a strong personal opinion on this.)
But apart from that, there’s no list, you can invent names.
“If the first name you want for your child is not on the list of approved names, you can apply to have it approved. You do this when you complete the application, where you are asked to explain why you want a non-approved first name.”
I think that’s a bit clearer than getting a veto, as vetos without a whitelist can get applied inconsistently.
Denmark did use to have "These and only these names" and they were written into the law (yes, there are pages and pages of Danish legislation that are just names), but now any non-offensive name is okay, and for administrative purposes, an "approved"-list is kept for easy reference to things that have already been, well, approved.
In here, for example, the name needs approval to not be harmful to the kid, nor degrading, nor diminutive form of name can be used. Also typos are checked for.
In many western cultures [1] it was (still is, but to a much lesser degree) customary for boy's (especially for the eldest) names to be hereditary. This gives natural tendency for the set of "traditional" boy names to be self reinforcing: remain more closed and maintain relative relevance. There are simply less boys to play with naming.
On top of that, it was common for the eldest son to inherit the estate and produce more offspring, while the younger were much more likely to be enlisted and as a result suffer from early-adulthood mortality. This further reinforces the traditional names.
I wonder how these statistics would look like if it was possible to control for these effects. Maybe look at variety of names among fallen soldiers versus the general population with some time lag?
> Almost all typical boy names have a feminine version
If I were to warrant a guess, I would say this is to quite a large degree an effect of the first-born being a girl and getting a feminized version of the hereditary name.
A different somewhat topic-related comment: I have a friend named Darakshan -- he took up his Sufi name (his birth name was David). Darakshan is generally considered a female name in Persian-Urdu culture -- I don't know whether he and his American Sufi friends who gave him that name were aware of that ... not that it matters; it does suit him. ("Bright," "shining," "radiant," "brilliant," or "luminous")
Some products do move the other way but it is a slow process: massages, wet wipes (Dude Wipes anyone?), manicures, etc. But I think a good majority of products marketed to women have a much harder time crossing over.
Marlboro cigarettes[0] come to mind.
That seems like a really awkward way to describe the observation.
Wouldn’t the “same” pattern be if the increase was due to greater uptake in the opposite sex.
Interesting, I wonder what causes this? In the US, is more common to name the first son after the father. Given this data comes from US social security information, that definitely has an impact.
The linguist in me can't decide if girl names are more dynamic (there are more options) or less dynamic (they don't get used for boys as often).