More Bad Baby Names

I stumbled upon some more great names on this witty Cajun blog - see the March 16th entry. Check it out at / http://www.mostlycajun.com/wordpress/

Sam's Bagels had a nice comment from author, Matthew Rayback . (By the way, Matthew, congratulations on your new son, very nicely named "Eli ") Matthew and his co-author, Michael Sherrod, have published "Bad Baby Names" at the reasonable price of $9.95. For those of you who don't already know, Dimitri and his wife are expecting a baby in May. Maybe the above book would make a nice shower gift from the bagel bunch? Check out Matthew's humorous and well-written blog at www.badbabynames.net. Below is a sample of one of his blog entries:


Unique? I Think Not
So, here’s an article from an Alberta newspaper about naming trends in Alberta over 2007. A substantial part of the article discusses a variety of “unique” names that popped up over the course of the year. Well, as any good editor will tell you, the word “unique” doesn’t mean “uncommon.” It means “one-of-a-kind.” So I decided to delve into the census records at Ancestry.com to see how many of these names actually were unique. Not surprisingly, almost none of them. Now for you purists, I didn’t look at every single instance of these names, so these numbers are more like broad strokes (okay, for you pure purists, we’ll say broad broad strokes :)). Also, it’s really hard to search for names by gender, so there may be some crossover there too. Either way, unique is not in the eye of the beholder. Take a look (the numbers in brackets are the number of hits in the Ancestry.com census database):

“Among the most interesting names for girls in 2007 were Princess [3,293], Psalms [no Psalms, but 11 Psalm], Rhapsody [4], Oakley [14,779], Kalifornia [none with a K], God’s [9 Gods (none with the apostrophe) and 491 God], Morning Star [3], Evening [116], Elektra [10], Creedance [unique!], Cassiopeia [1], Breaze [2], Blessing [495], Brazil [834], Cerenity [none with a C, 8 with an S], Chaos [28] and Raenbow-Roze [unique! sort of, see below]…

“There was no shortage of uncommon names for little boys in 2007 either. Topping the list is an Adonis [1,789], Blue-Quill [unique!], Corny [267], Felony [11], Furious [7], Geronimo [5,993], Gretzky [unique!], Hinton [5,862], Jackpine [8], Jesus [101, 382, though I’m sure a lot of these are Jesús], Kajun [unique!], Ivy [of course there were a lot of girls named this, but as I scanned the 159,763 entries, I did find a lot of men with this name too], Little [49,875], Maxxamillion [52 with one X], Milwaukee [11], Obsidian-Angel [unique! though there are 60,410 Angels], Rainbow [749], Salmon [8,689], Slim [1,671], Stylez [1], Tao [335] and Zero [896]. There were also three Blazes [723]….”
Unique my eye.