I believe Aria is on the list because if is the default girls name given to one born in an Aria hospital if she is not otherwise named before being sent home.
The linked article at BabyCenter does say:
Note: To capture true popularity, our exclusive baby names list combines names that sound the same but have multiple spellings (like Sophia and Sofia, or Jackson and Jaxon).
if that’s what you’re thinking of?
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Hugely popularized, maybe, but not unknown.
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Yep. I looked for that, but must have missed it. Thanks.
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Where, though? Doesn’t that seem like a U.S.-centric list? Or at least North hemisphere/Western hemisphere?
The source article at BabyCenter doesn’t seem to say, though they do list that they have a site in Spanish, and other sites in Arabia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Malaysia, and UK. I wonder if they polled users on all their sites?
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That name doesn’t strike me as particularly weird. Angel names are fairly common, and one of the most common boy names, Michael (and its myriad distaff variants) is a war angel of the Apocalypse in much more explicit and less apocryphal religious traditions/texts. Azrael, a name that more or less just means “Helper/Angel of God” doesn’t seem much more extreme. And, unlike ‘Digital,’ has etymological history of being a name.
Which isn’t to rag on the kid named Digital, or suggest it’s a bad name. Just that it’s deffo a more unusual name than a word that’s been a name for a while, rather than an adjective the modern usage of which is quite young.
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Yeah as a Jennifer born in 1973 I’d have sold my soul for a cooler name. Or at least one that 60% of the girls my age didn’t share (Jennifer is actually a pretty cool name. It’s jut that everyone else thought so too). In my 3rd grade class, there were 5 of us in a class of 25. Three of whom had the same last initial.
True story: at 15 I tried to change my name to “Rainsong Stormsinger” so it’s a very good thing that 15-year-olds aren’t allowed to do that with impunity (it was my BBS handle.)
My friend (also named Jennifer) gave her older son a “unique” name. Then she moved out here to Washington and there’s another kid with the same name in her son’s preschool class.
I have a weird loathing for most girl’s names that end in A. It feels … stereotypically feminized.
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Y’know, my feelings on this are: “Why be boring?” Why not name your kid something exciting, or mellifluous, or significant? I don’t think that you should be overly whimsical, since changing your name can be a hassle later in life, and you subject them to the cruelties of their peers. But I like what Penn Gillette did, where he basically said, “Middle names don’t matter” and his daughter’s second name was “Crimefighter.” Though, he does get ever so tired of explaining the name to people.
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Another year where “Destroyer Of Worlds” doesn’t top the boy’s OR girl’s name list. People just have no taste.
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I currently teach a college class where I have two Justins and three (3!!) Alexes, yet, "most popular baby names of 1997 (they’re 21 on avg) does not correlate.
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I think it’s remarkable that 5 of those boys’ names are so new. I mean, when I was a kid I had never heard of them. I don’t think I knew a single person named Jackson, Aiden, Caden, Grayson, or Mason.
(Oh! Except for Mason Reese!)
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Here is the thing about names:
People are bastards and kids merciless. Giving your kid a name like Harry Butts or that is easy to rhyme with vulgarities will get them teased. Of course, you can have a most generic name and get them teased.
I was a bit hesitant when naming our kid, as her first name is a bit old fashioned with more than one typical spelling. Only after seeing another little girl with the same name did it all sort of settle for me. She actually takes her first and middle name from great-grandmas.
But when it comes to odd spellings, what would have seen odd 20 years ago, is now common place. At one point it was mainly “ethnic” names with odd spellings, but now everyone is doing it. Weird names aren’t so weird anymore because so many people are doing it.
That said, people can still be surprised. On one hand something like “ABCDE” seems creative, and on the other hand it also seems like people trying too hard, and whether it is right or wrong regardless that it shouldn’t, it will lead to some snickers or bullying in their life time. I personally think parents should be thoughtful of this when choosing names (Yes, I wanted to name my kid Ash if it was a boy, but, yeah, I wouldn’t have.) But if one does encounter something like this, it is their duty as an adult to not let it get the better of them. The kids obviously have no say in this.
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Several of those names are old. Jackson? Very old. My ex FiL is named Jackson. I know a 50 year old named Aiden. Some names tend to cycle through.
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I’m 100% with you on this. Names, in my mind, are sacrosanct… it is next to inexcusable to deliberately refer to a person by a name other than their preferred one.
There are a lot of corners of the internet where mangling a particular person’s name–Benedict Cumberbatch, M. Night Shyamalan, etc.–is considered cool, but as resident party pooper I find it to be in extremely poor taste even if the people in question are usually gigantic tools. Regular posters in this very community do it with Trump to “Drumpf,” as if it’s acceptable in any realm of society to make an arbitrary decision about what a stranger’s “real” name is, just because you don’t like them.
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I don’t think there is a question, it’s wrong on the part of the bully. why is this some sort of controversial point?
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I agree with you. I dunno why I chose to use neutral language in that case. I’ll alter it.
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Same in many sensible democratic countries.
I’m fully behind those laws. I met to many people who are terrible.
Your child will be bullied anyway for any name. You should not have the right to make their life hell from the start.
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I was bullied with a perfectly normal name. People shouldn’t be bullies and we shouldn’t contort ourselves to try and avoid being bullied, because then they just win.
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