Baby names. For some people, especially women and girls, the act of naming their baby, whether they are expecting it or not, is a ritual. You draw up a list of names as a child or young teen, keep it forever, and adapt it as you get older, waiting for the moment you can bestow your newborn with the name that has been bouncing in your head for years. This starkly contrasts with decades and even centuries earlier when individuals named their children typically after relatives, and the same dozen or so boy and girl names were being used left and right.
What inspired me to comment on this recent phenomenon was when I was scrolling on TikTok and came across one video of a woman visibly upset. The reason why? A popular influencer used the same baby name for her son that she was planning to use. Coming from a family where my cousins have the same name and from a culture where there is at least one Maria in every family, expressing disappointment over someone who you do not even know personally using a name you want to use is a tad eye-rolling. But who am I to judge? A desire to be unique, to stand out, to be accredited for your novelties is a human experience. It now happens to be that baby names are a new way of differentiating us from others.
Some Stats
In the 1950s, James, Michael, and Robert were the most popular baby boy names in the United States according to the American Social Security Administration with 843,731, 837,430, and 830,364 babies with those names respectively. For the girls, Mary, Linda, and Patricia were the three most popular names, with 625,603, 564,353, and 459,671 baby girls being named respectively. Flash forward to the 2010s, Noah, Liam, and Jacob cracked the top three boy names, with 183,258, 173,939, and 163,197 respective boys. As for girls Emma, Olivia, and Sophia topped the charts with 194,988, 184,487, and 181,091 babies respectively being born with those names. One interesting factor of this data is the significant decrease in the number of children being born with names outside of the top three for each gender. And while Statistics 101 taught me that correlation doesn't equal causation, there is some reason to believe that parents-to-be don't want their child to be a literal average Joe.
Tiktok and Influencers
One of the pioneers so-to-speak of the baby name craze is model and influencer Nara Smith. Nara and her husband, Lucky Blue Smith (heavy foreshadowing there) received a lot of online attention for the first and middle names they have given their three children. Rumble Honey (girl, age 4), Slim Easy (boy, age 3), and Whimsy Lou (girl, age <1). Smith has also posted videos on tiktok where she shared names she enjoyed but didn’t use after she gave birth to Whimsy Lou. Among these names were Plum, Tank, Lemon, Pippin, Halo, Dusk, and Flick. I’ll allow the readers to guess which ones she intended to use for a girl or boy.
Nara Smith is not the only online presence known for unique names. Kansas City Chiefs Quarterback Patrick Mahomes and his wife Brittany Mahomes have three children, Sterling, Bronze, and Golden. Clearly, they are a sucker for a good theme. Francesca Farago and her partner Jesse Sullivan had twins this past November and the months leading up to their birth were met with their followers rolling their eyes and exasperating at the potential baby names they were floating around. Among the many names listed, the most notable include Caspian (the most ‘tame’ of the list), Lyrics, Heart, Lovely, Prosper, Darling, Ethereal, and the one that garnered the most attention, Afternoon. After the birth of the boy-girl twins, they settled on the very modest Locket and Poetry.
As influencers continue to spearhead the baby name dialogue, the seriousness, obsession, and fussiness over what to name your child has led to actual careers dedicated to this. Certain tiktok users have been able to create a career based on giving baby name consultations to expecting couples. Colleen Slagen is one of these individuals whose rates start at $250 for such services.
Have Baby Names Gone Too Far?
While we can agree that someone else’s child is none of our concern, especially for some random wealthy person on the internet, some have reason to believe that certain names have simply gone too far. Elon Musk’s child with Canadian singer-songwriter Grimes is probably the most famous case. In May 2020, the two announced the birth of their son, originally named X Æ A-12. However, due to California law not allowing numbers in the name, they were forced to change it to X Æ A-xii.
Although the case of Musk and Grimes is an extreme example, they are not the only couple in the world who have given their child questionable names. The cases mentioned before are certainly obscure enough names to have any teacher or doctor’s eyebrows raise at the sight of such a name.
One common rebuttal individuals have at hearing these names is posing the question of what the baby will have to go through when they enter adulthood. Would anyone be inclined to hire someone whose name can be found in an English dictionary? But at this rate, maybe the world's future classrooms will be filled with Afternoons, Halos, Flicks, and Ethereals, or whatever names (words really) expecting parents find to be captivating.
Baby Names, An Expression of Self?
In an episode of Sex and the City, the four main characters attend a baby shower of their mutual friend. By the end of the baby shower, one of the main characters, Charlotte, found out that the mother-to-be was using her dream baby name. While the expecting mother denied ever hearing that name from her, Charlotte and her friends left the shower in an angry frenzy. While the show was filmed in the 1990s, it is clear that it remains relevant, and perhaps more so now. What causes such sudden possessiveness over a name? What makes people take offense so badly at someone ‘stealing’ a completely abstract conception?
As I scoured tiktok videos to get a better understanding of exactly what people are saying about baby names, one common factor was how attached people were to the aesthetic of a name. Not just the sound, but the essence of what the name captured; a fantasy hero, the cool girl, a theme that goes with older siblings. While anyone can find a name to be pretty, these names come with a mood board and an entire personality. The excitement at that these parents have when revealing or listing potential names is exerted in such a way that naming their child is more for themselves than the baby. But what is a child other than an extension of their parents, an entity to live vicariously through?
Final Comments
When all is said and done, a name can simply be just a name. Trends come, and trends go. And even though names are a big part of our identity, they do not define us. While expecting parents may stress the most captivating and unique name for their baby, the world will always need its Megans, Noahs, Emilys, and Johns.
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