Baby Names

Your name says little about you but it speaks volumes about your parents. Children's names are clear markers of parents hopes, dreams, aspirations, education and political leanings. It's why most common name studies are so closely watched by many soon to be parents (or more likely mothers).

This year's official tally (using social security data)won't be released until May, however The Baby Center has jumped in with their most popular list based upon reporting families. Not quite the same but there will be a great deal of overlap.

I remember "The baby name book" sitting on my wife's nightstand for several years. I doubt I ever flipped through it's pages; somehow our children were named, and we've a defendable story for each. The chapter on "do names matter" in Freakonomics was my entry into the American baby naming ritual.

Using data collected by the state of California, the authors of Freakonomics reached the following conclusions: "As a mother becomes better-educated, she’s much more likely to give her boy or girl a popular name, and much less likely to give her an uncommon or unique name. And one of the statistics that just leaps out at us about this that is amongst African American mothers with less than a high school degree, 36 percent of them give their daughters a unique name. Now, the statistical probability that you could give your child a name that nobody else would have is really kind of remarkable. And if you think about it as an act of imagination, it’s pretty astounding."

So what are the most popular baby names for 2013?
For boys:

Jackson (up from 22 last year), Aiden, Liam, Lucas, Noah, Mason, Jayden, Ethan, Jacob, Jack

Girls:

Sophia, Emma, Olivia, Isabella, Mia, Ava, Lily, Zoe, Emily, Chloe

Not one of those names was ever in consideration for my children.


Toad
PS: For those keeping score, author, raconteur,  polemicist Christopher Hitchens died two years ago on this date.

Two questions

Photo courtesy of New York Times

About once a week I remind Mrs. T that Eliot Spitzer said he was sorry and ask her if she believes that his wife and daughters have forgiven him yet?

She is of the opinion that it may take a bit longer than the 21st. century.

So I'm curious, what power on earth gets a grieving wife onto that stage? I'd like to synthesize it, bottle it and make it available for sale. I'd be vilified like no body's business, but probably very rich.

NEXT QUESTION

In spite of my basic apolitical nature, I posit that there is a better than 50-50 shot of a black man being elected President of the United States next month. That got me thinking about race and politics in America.

African Americans, tend to name their children with more enthusiasm than whites. For example, let me offer this tidbit from Freakenomics:

"Today, more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year. Even more remarkably, nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among every baby, white and black, born that year in California."

So here's my question. If Mrs. Obama, instead of being named Michelle, had a distinctly black first name, would her husband have a snowballs chance in hell of being elected President of the free world?

Fire away.

Toad