I'm obsessed with names
Influencer baby names, aptronyms, and vintage Quaker names
At my current job, I read roughly 100 local news stories each day from around the country, from Maine to New Mexico, and I encounter tons of interesting names. I started keeping a notes app list of my favorite names — not for any purpose other than looking back on them and say “what a name.”. I won’t share most because they’re not public figures; they just committed a crime or got in a car crash and someone wrote a news article about it. But some of my favorites include an 18-year-old mayor of Edgewater, Florida, named Diezel Depew; a Baltimore lawyer named Lucius Outlaw III; a Christmas tree farmer named Truitt Zipperer; a zoo curator named Tracey Dolphin.
Recently, my sister sent me this Vox article on “The baby name boom” and how the current baby name trend is to find the least trendy and most unique name for a baby. Some of this has to do with the fact that it’s now much easier to find out whether a name you like is popular or trendy. In ye olden times, there was no way of knowing how many people were naming their kid Sophie unless you personally knew an abundance of Sophies, and either way, the idea of your kid having a name that nobody else had was just not that important.
The Vox article explains that “For most of American history, according to the Atlantic, families typically named their children after an ancestor, which meant that there were usually several Marys or Johns per age cohort. It wasn’t until the cultural shifts of the 1960s, with smaller families and fewer children performing labor, that parents wanted to bequeath babies with names that reflected their individuality.”
My first name comes from my great-grandma, and my middle name comes from my grandpa, who died before I was born. But my sister, who is older, has both a middle and first name that were pulled out of thin air, and consequently, her name is more uncommon than mine. Although, even though my name was in the top 10 list from the year I was born, I’ve never felt like there was a huge abundance of Hannahs running around the way I imagine someone named Sarah feels. For example, I can’t think of a single A-list celebrity named Hannah.
The Vox article mentions a phenomenon I have also witnessed, which is the baby name culture on TikTok. There are entire accounts dedicated to analyzing name trends and providing name suggestions. I follow a woman who predicts influencer baby names, sometimes with laser accuracy. She’ll see an influencer is pregnant, peruse their account to get a gist of their vibe, and create a list based on their aesthetic, their interests, and the names of their previous kids. Recently she did a video about a genre of blonde Mormon influencers who live in Hawaii and said their baby names tend to fall into categories: earthy names, ocean-related names, and “commodities exploited by the East India Trading Company.” (Names revealed in the video include Sunny, Strider, Bindi, and Velzy.)
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Another TikToker I’ve seen collects vintage yearbooks and shares the interesting names she finds in them, names that I’ve never heard in my entire life like Hewat, Philemon, Trilby, Berthemia, Alvera, Alphild, Cleora. There are boys named Holly and girls named Ivan.
Everything I’ve written about so far is in regards to white naming culture because I’m a white and it’s what I know best. I think we all know that the whites are the least creative when it comes to baby naming — remember when Gwyneth Paltrow naming her daughter Apple was the cRaZiEst thing?
Lately, I’ve been into aptronyms, which is when a person’s name coincides with their job. For example, if you went to a dentist named Dr. Tooth. A Wikipedia list of aptronyms includes Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, a Black woman who went viral a few years ago because she got her PhD in higher education leadership with a dissertation titled “Black Names in White Classrooms: Teacher Behaviors and Student Perceptions.” Other examples include a tennis player named Tennys Sandgren; Philander Rodman, father to Dennis, who fathered 26 children by 16 women; and a meteorologist named Sara Blizzard. There is the aforementioned Tracey Dolphin, and most recently, I saw an article that mentioned that Taylor Swift’s pianist is named Karina DePiano.
The Wikipedia page also includes a section of “inaptronyms,” which is when a name is the opposite of a person’s occupation or personality, for example, a Catholic clergyman named Jaime Sin who was then made a cardinal and therefore became Cardinal Sin.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a viral Tweet from a historian who’d been collecting a list of 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names she found during her research. The list has dozens of names and shook me to my core. Some prime examples: Fartley Brain, Discipline Matthews, Corn Russell, Experience Cuppage, and, of course, Gey Poope. I want to time travel to the 17th century only to ask a Quaker community what was in their water, and then bring some of that water back to the present as a fun experiment.
I don’t have kids, so I can’t talk about what it’s like the pick a name for a kid who will grow into an adult, or how to reconcile the names you like with the prevalence (or lack thereof) of that name in the culture. How do you juggle wanting to give your kid a special name, wanting to name it after someone important, wanting to give them a gender-neutral name so they don’t feel constrained by the perceived masculinity or femininity of their name, etc.
But I do have a dog, and we named her Sesame, which is, not to brag, a perfect name for her. We knew we wanted to name our dog after something food related and had a whole list that included Artichoke, Parsley, and Rhubarb, among others. But when I look at her, she just looks like a total Sesame, even though when we call her name at the park, people usually think we’re saying Stephanie, but sometimes Bethany or Destiny.
More reading on names!
I had an RA in college whose name was David Camera. He was, of course, a photography major. And a jerk, but that's a different story.
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