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Unpopular Baby Names: Avoiding the Jacobs, Emilys and Madisons

February 20, 2005
· Martin Kelley

My wife has now fin­ished the first trimester of her preg­nan­cy so we can let peo­ple know that our lit­tle Theo’s going to be a big broth­er this fall. That means it’s time to think of baby names.

Fallen Baby Names List
Name Rank:
1900		 Rank:
2003		 Drop Name Rank:
1900		 Rank:
2003		 Drop
1 Her­bert 32 962 930 1 Edna 17 986 969
2 Her­man 45 974 929 2 Louise 24 977 953
3 Floyd 50 964 914 3 Beat­rice 44 982 938
4 J 35 920 885 4 Bertha 26 963 937
5 Fred 19 876 857 5 Gladys 15 945 930
6 Earl 27 882 855 6 Lucille 49 954 905
7 Clarence 18 717 699 7 Dorothy 7 846 839
8 Howard 30 721 691 8 Hazel 20 681 661
9 Alfred 33 683 650 9 Edith 25 683 658
10 Ralph 23 660 637 10 Frances 16 580 564
11 Elmer 36 654 618 11 Irene 21 581 560
12 Harold 15 595 580 12 Marie 8 496 488
13 Ernest 26 599 573 13 Martha 31 487 456
14 Eugene 49 578 529 14 Alice 10 426 416
15 Leonard 48 571 523 15 Helen 2 389 387
16 Har­ry 13 517 504 16 Ruth 5 350 345
17 Fran­cis 37 509 472 17 Rose 14 358 344
18 Willie 28 454 426 18 Annie 28 339 311
19 Roy 24 433 409 19 Clara 23 295 272
20 Wal­ter 11 356 345 20 Esther 30 297 267
21 Arthur 14 353 339 21 Josephine 33 260 227
22 Carl 20 357 337 22 Eva 39 215 176
23 Lawrence 34 344 310 23 Ruby 42 197 155
24 Albert 16 311 295 24 Mar­garet 3 130 127
25 Joe 38 321 283 25 Cather­ine 19 106 87
26 Theodore 42 313 271 26 Lau­ra 50 122 72
27 Louis 21 278 257 27 Mary 1 61 60
28 Leo 44 288 244 28 Eve­lyn 34 89 55
29 Frank 8 228 220 29 Anna 4 21 17
30 Ray­mond 22 188 166 30 Eliz­a­beth 6 9 3
31 George 4 137 133 31 Mil­dred 9 n/a 0
32 Edward 9 128 119 32 Flo­rence 11 n/a 0
33 Paul 17 124 107 33 Ethel 12 n/a 0
34 Hen­ry 10 116 106 34 Lil­lian 13 n/a 0
35 Peter 46 148 102 35 Gertrude 22 n/a 0
36 Ken­neth 47 109 62 36 Mabel 27 n/a 0
37 Richard 25 86 61 37 Bessie 32 n/a 0
38 Charles 6 59 53 38 Elsie 35 n/a 0
39 Robert 7 35 28 39 Pearl 36 n/a 0
40 Thomas 12 36 24 40 Agnes 37 n/a 0
41 John 1 17 16 41 Thel­ma 38 n/a 0
42 James 3 18 15 42 Myr­tle 40 n/a 0
43 William 2 11 9 43 Ida 41 n/a 0
44 Jack 41 46 5 44 Min­nie 43 n/a 0
45 Joseph 5 6 1 45 Vio­la 47 n/a 0
46 Samuel 31 23 -8 46 Nel­lie 48 n/a 0
47 David 29 14 -15 47 Grace 18 13 -5
48 Antho­ny 43 10 -33 48 Julia 45 33 -12
49 Andrew 40 5 -35 49 Emma 29 2 -27
50 Michael 39 2 -37 50 Sarah 46 12 -34

Most new par­ents want to give their child unique names and want to steer clear of the most over-used names. Yet if you tell your friends you’re nam­ing your boy Jacob or Joshua, they’ll all cheer you on. If your lit­tle girl goes by Emi­ly, Emma or Madi­son, they’ll think that’s dar­ling. Yet those are the top three boy and girl names for 2003.

They are tens of thou­sands of kids get­ting these top names every year. All of the kids with these names are going to be get­ting nick­names to dif­fer­en­ti­ate them from one anoth­er: just hope your lit­tle angel isn’t the one that gets tagged “The Ugly Emi­ly” or “The Stu­pid Joshua” by their third grade classmates!

There are def­i­nite trends in names. Cer­tain names tend to sound fresh and dar­ing even when they’re overused and trite. The only way to train your ear away from such trends is to method­i­cal­ly study the data (the New York Times had a fas­in­cat­ing arti­cle on all this when we were pon­der­ing Theo’s name, Where Have All the Lisas Gone?).

For­tu­nate­ly the U.S. Social Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion pro­vides a list of the most pop­u­lar baby names by year, going back to the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Using this, my wife and I were able to choose “Theodore” for our first child’s name; born in 2003, he name is the 313th most pop­u­lar boy’s name and drop­ping. Yet it’s a known name and there have been great twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry folks who have answered to it (e.g., Dr. Suess, Theodore Geisel).

How is a par­ent to choose? One recent after­noon I cut and past­ed the top fifty boy and girl names of the first decade of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. I looked up their cur­rent sta­tus (the 2003 data) to see what move­ment has occured in their place­ment. The old names are still known but some have fall­en far out of use. Her­bert, for exam­ple, was the 32nd most pop­u­lar boy’s name in the first decade of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry, but now ranks a dis­mal 930! If you want a name every­one knows but no one is giv­ing their kid, Her­bert’s your choice for boy’s and Edna’s your choice for girls.

Now these fall­en names prob­a­bly sound awk­ward. But that’s the point: they run counter to the trends. I’ll admit that some deserve their reduced sta­tus; I can­not imag­ine sad­dling a lit­tle girl with “Edna.” But in the list are some gems which have been undu­ly demot­ed by the trend-setters.

We’ve been very hap­py with “Theodore,” the 26th most fall­en name of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tu­ry. He’s offi­cial­ly named after his great-great uncle. The social secu­ri­ty date­base assured us that the name was safe from trendiness.

So what will the new baby be named? Check in soon!! The due date is the end of August.

Update: drum­roll please.… Our new son’s name is Fran­cis! And fur­ther follow-up brought us Gre­go­ry and Lau­ra. We’re offi­cial­ly out of the baby-making game now but if we were look­ing for more, Walt and Dorothy would be our next picks of classic-but-uncommon names.

The Left Wing Conspiracy Revealed by Non​vi​o​lence​.org

December 10, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Non​vi​o​lence​.org read­ers may not be aware that my per­son­al site has been the talk of the polit­i­cal inter­net for the last few days. Since post­ing an “account of get­ting a phone call from a CBS News pub­li­cist”, I’ve been linked to by a Who’s Who of blog­ging glit­er­at­ti: Won­kette, Instapun­dit, The Volokh Con­spir­a­cy, Lit­tle Green Foot­balls, Rather­Biased, etc. For a short time yes­ter­day, the sto­ry was a part of the second-ranked arti­cle on Tech­no­rati’s Pol­i­tics Atten­tion index.

A hack from CBS News called me to say they were doing a pro­gram on an issue that’s cen­tral to Nonviolence.org’s man­date: con­sci­en­tious resis­tance to mil­i­tary ser­vice. After look­ing over the mate­r­i­al, I thought the inter­views of resisters who have fled to Cana­da would be inter­est­ing to my read­ers and so wrote a short entry on it. Think­ing it all a lit­tle fun­ny that a pub­li­cist would care about Non​vi​o​lence​.org, I men­tioned the inci­dent in the “Sto­ries of Non​vi​o​lence​.org” sec­tion of my per­son­al site. One by one the lead­ing polit­i­cal sites of the blo­gos­phere have run the sto­ry as fur­ther proof of the vast left-wing main­stream media con­spir­a­cy. It’s rather fun­ny actually.

I have to won­der is who’s kid­ding who with all this feigned out­rage? For those miss­ing the irony gene: the Non​vi​o​lence​.org Pay­Pal account cur­rent­ly has a bal­ance $6.18, the bulk of which comes from the last dona­tion – $5.00 back on Novem­ber 20th. My cor­ner of the left wing con­spir­a­cy is fund­ed by the vast per­son­al wealth I accu­mu­late as a book­store clerk.

Won­ket­te’s pages adver­tise “spon­sor­ship oppor­tu­ni­ties,” she’s a recent cov­er girl on New York Times Mag­a­zine, her hus­band is an edi­tor at New York mag­a­zine and in Octo­ber she cashed out her blog­ging fame for a $275,000 advance for her first nov­el (“It’s not Brid­get Jones does Wash­ing­ton, it’s Nick Horn­by does pol­i­tics”: good grief). Eugene Volokh has clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court (for San­dra Day O’Con­nor), teach­es law at UCLA and just had a big op-ed in the Times. Instapun­dit’s Glenn Reynolds teach­es law at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ten­nessee, has served on White House advi­so­ry pan­els, and is a paid cor­re­spon­dent for MSNBC. Yet he, like the oth­ers, calls a two minute phone call “recruit­ing”?

I’m begin­ning to think the real inter­est comes from the fact that this top tier of blog­gers is total­ly in bed (lit­er­al­ly) with the MSM. Their income comes from their con­nec­tions with media and polit­i­cal pow­er. Their carefully-crafted fas­cade of snark­ish inde­pen­dence would crum­ble if their phone logs were made pub­lic. They’re not real­ly blog­ging in their paja­mas, folks.

By men­tion­ing the exis­tance of blog pub­li­cists, I’ve threat­ened to blow their cov­er. Pay no atten­tion to the men behind the cur­tains: my social gaffe was in pub­licly admit­ting that the main­stream media courts polit­i­cal blogs. Kudos to jour­nal­ist Derek Rose on admit­ting the practice:

But why should­n’t a news orga­ni­za­tion’s pub­lic­i­ty depart­ment court blog­gers? As a MSM mem­ber, I get emails from TV flacks all the time pro­mot­ing their scoops. From ABC, for exam­ple, I’ve received emails regard­ing a tape they got of the Belt­way sniper’s call to the Rockville police; Bar­bara Wal­ters’ Hillary Clin­ton inter­view; and their ‘Azzam the Amer­i­can’ video … as well as a Rush Lim­baugh drug laun­der­ing sto­ry that nev­er panned out. I even got atten­tion from pub­li­cists when I was work­ing for a news­pa­per that did­n’t have a 20th of the cir­cu­la­tion of Instapundit…

Rose aside, there’s incred­i­ble dis­tor­tion in the “report­ing,” a term I have to use very loose­ly. Won­kette says “Kel­ley claims that a CBS min­ion put the screws to him to post some­thing about a ’60 Min­utes’ pack­age on con­sci­en­tious objec­tors” yet all read­ers have to do is fol­low the link to see I nev­er said any­thing like that. Why do the cream of blog­gers feel like a posse of self-absorbed sev­enth graders? When I start­ed Non​vi​o​lence​.org back in 1995, I thought the brave new polit­i­cal world of the inter­net might be All the Pres­i­den­t’s Men. Boy was I wrong: it turns it’s just Heathers. God help us.

Why don’t we say that charity and love are Christian issue?

November 3, 2004
· Martin Kelley

In this elec­tion, reli­gious con­ser­v­a­tives were able to craft a mes­sage mak­ing same-sex mar­riages look like an afront to apple pie and base­ball and of course peo­ple vot­ed against it. What if we could have some­how framed this elec­tion with the details of human suf­fer­ing that these laws suggest?
Now avail­able for the fash­ion­able Bush-era bumper. Pro­ceeds go to sup­port the Non​vi​o​lence​.org websites:
  

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

GWB: “Ah, we did? I don’t think so.”

August 27, 2004
· Martin Kelley

An “unin­ten­tion­al­ly hilar­i­ous inter­view of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/27/politics/campaign/27bush.html is excerpt­ed in today’s New York Times_. One gem con­cerned glob­al warm­ing. Just a few days ago his sec­re­taries of ener­gy and com­merce deliv­ered a report to Con­gress say­ing that car­bon diox­ide emis­sions (cars, coal burn­ing plants, etc.) real­ly are caus­ing glob­al warm­ing. Well yes, most of us have fig­ured that out already but this is an Admin­is­tra­tion that’s runned and staffed by oil indus­try exec­u­tives and they’ve insist­ed for years that the evi­dence isn’t clear. That they’re now admit­ting the cause of glob­al warm­ing is big and it should cer­tain­ly auger a over­haul of U.S. ener­gy poli­cies. But when asked why the admin­is­tra­tion had changed its posi­tion on what caus­es glob­al warm­ing Bush respond­ed “Ah, we did? I don’t think so.”
He also admit­ted that he had made a “mis­cal­cu­la­tion of what the con­di­tions would be” in post­war iraq but said he was­n’t going to go “on the couch” to rethink his deci­sion or his decision-making process. Uhh.., Mis­ter Pres­i­dent, maybe you should think about this before offer­ing to serve anoth­er four years?

Emerging Church Movement hits New York Times

February 18, 2004
· Martin Kelley

Today’s New York Times has an arti­cle called “Hip New Church­es Pray to a Dif­fer­ent Drum­mer” about post­mod­ern and emer­gent church­es. The arti­cle has some good obser­va­tions and inter­views many of the right peo­ple, but the pre­sen­ta­tion is skewed: there on the front cov­er of the print edi­tion are some New Agey hip­sters hold­ing their ears and hearts in some sort of mock-Medieval prayer, sit­ting in big chairs over the head­line about the “dif­fer­ent drum­mer.” Egads.

The pho­to reminds me of my New York Times moment, when the pho­tog­ra­ph­er insist­ed on a few shots of me hold­ing a gui­tar, which made it onto the “Cyber­Times” cov­er, but the para­graph describ­ing the move­ment is a good, con­cise one:

Called “emerg­ing” or “post­mod­ern” church­es, they are diverse in the­ol­o­gy and method, linked loose­ly by Inter­net sites, Web logs, con­fer­ences and a grow­ing stack of hip-looking paper­backs. Some reli­gious his­to­ri­ans believe the church­es rep­re­sent the next wave of evan­gel­i­cal wor­ship, after the boom in megachurch­es in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Still, much of the arti­cle talks about the super­fi­cial stuff, what Jor­dan Coop­er calls the “can­dles and cof­fee” super­fi­cial­i­ty of some of a form-only emer­gent church style. There cer­tain­ly is a lot of chaff with the wheat. Julie read the arti­cle and was real­ly turned off to the dumb side of the emer­gent church:

Hon­ey, I just can’t get with it. I empathize some­what, but I’m a tra­di­tion­al­ist, so I can’t say I don’t take just as much offense at “bor­row­ing” Catholic and Ortho­dox spir­i­tu­al prac­tices as I do at the import­ing of the sweat­lodge ripped off from Native Amer­i­cans. I’m not say­ing that all Emerg­ing Church groups do rip off, they’re try­ing to find some­thing legit­i­mate, I can see that. It’s just that they are set­tling for part of the truth with­out look­ing at the whole pic­ture. Lec­tio Div­ina is part of a larg­er Catholic the­ol­o­gy and real­ly should­n’t be divorced from it, etc. I empathize with the unchurched and the unfriend­li­ness of tra­di­tion­al church­es to the com­plete­ly unchurched. I don’t know what the answer is, but this move­ment just strikes me as bizarre. Of course, again, I’m com­ing from a tra­di­tion­al Catholic per­spec­tive here, so “church” to me means some­thing utter­ly dif­fer­ent than to many, espe­cial­ly the unchurched and evan­gel­i­cals, for exam­ple, who see wor­ship as more open and dynam­ic and involv­ing the heart, not so much about form. I guess in the end, it’s just that some of this Emerg­ing Church stuff is just too “cool.” I’m glad that it puts some peo­ple in touch with God, and that’s a good thing. But church should nev­er be too cool or too com­fy or too sen­ti­men­tal. It should chal­lenge too. What I’d like to hear in one of these arti­cles is how these new forms and this new move­ment actu­al­ly chal­lenge peo­ple to com­mit to Christ and to change their lives. Hmmm.

So true, so true. What I’ve won­dered is whether tra­di­tion­al Quak­erism has a thresh­ing func­tion to offer the emergent-church seek­ers: we have the inti­mate meet­ings (part­ly by design, part­ly because our meet­ings are half-empty), the lan­guage of the direct expe­ri­ence with God, the warn­ing against super­fi­cial­i­ty. I can hear Julie laugh­ing at me say­ing this, as Friends have large­ly lost the abil­i­ty to chal­lenge or artic­u­late our faith, which is the oth­er half of the equa­tion. But I’d like to believe we’re due for some gen­er­a­tional renewals our­selves, which might bring us to the right place at the right time to engage with the emer­gent churchers and once more gath­er a new people.

WRL Current Commentary

November 21, 2003
· Martin Kelley

I’m intrigued by a new page on the War Resister League’s site named “Cur­rent Commentary”:www.warresisters.org/commentary.htm. The cur­rent con­tent isn’t ter­ri­bly excit­ing — a col­lec­tion of presumably-unpublished let­ters to the _New York Times_ — but it would be excit­ing to see WRL’s take on cur­rent events. I’ve missed David McReynold’s once ubiq­ui­tous emails and sus­pect peo­ple would be will­ing to look to WRL again for com­men­tary on cur­rent events,

Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation

November 3, 2003
· Martin Kelley

For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long arti­cle by David Rieff, “Blue­print for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongo­ing prob­lems with the U.S. occu­pa­tion of iraq:
bq. His­tor­i­cal­ly, it is rare that a warm wel­come is extend­ed to an occu­py­ing mil­i­tary force for very long, unless, that is, the post­war goes very smooth­ly. And in iraq, the post­war occu­pa­tion has not gone smoothly.
The arti­cle looks at the ide­o­log­i­cal roots of the post-war plan of occu­pa­tion. A num­ber of key deci­sions were made in the Pen­tagon’s war room with lit­tle input from the State Depart­ment. Much of the plan­ning revolved around Ahmad Cha­l­abi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi oppo­si­tion par­ty leader dur­ing the last decade of Sad­dam Hus­sein’s reign. Cha­l­abi spent most of the 90s in Lon­don and Wash­ing­ton, where he became the dar­ling of the Repub­li­can pol­i­cy hawks who were also side­lined from polit­i­cal pow­er. Togeth­er Cha­l­abi and Wash­ing­ton fig­ures like Don­ald Rums­feld spent the 90s hatch­ing up war plans if they ever took pow­er again. Unfor­tu­nate­ly Rums­feld’s plans did­n’t have the wide­spread sup­port of the U.S. diplo­mat­ic and mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment and Cha­l­abi has had vir­tu­al­ly no sup­port inside iraq. But the con­ver­sa­tions and deci­sions between the token iraqi oppo­si­tion and the out-of-power Repub­li­can hawks has dri­ven the occupation:
bq. The lack of secu­ri­ty and order on the ground in iraq today is in large mea­sure a result of deci­sions made and not made in Wash­ing­ton before the war start­ed, and of the spe­cif­ic approach­es toward cop­ing with post­war iraq under­tak­en by Amer­i­can civil­ian offi­cials and mil­i­tary com­man­ders in the imme­di­ate after­math of the war.
Rieff is pes­simistic but he backs up his claims. The arti­cle is long but it’s a must-read. The post­war occu­pa­tions of iraq and Afghanistan will almost cer­tain­ly be the defin­ing for­eign pol­i­cy issue of this gen­er­a­tion, and paci­fists must look beyond ide­ol­o­gy and rhetoric to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing in iraq.

Betting on Terror

July 29, 2003
· Martin Kelley

The news sites are all report­ing a Pen­ta­gon plan to bet on future ter­ror­ist activ­i­ty (BBC). It’s report­ed as a stock market-style sys­tem in which sucess­ful pre­dic­tions by investors would win them money.
Some­one at the Pen­ta­gon has read a lit­tle too many books about the infi­nite wis­dom of the free mar­ket. There are those who have a reli­gious faith in the pow­er of unfet­tered cap­i­tal­ism, who posit it as a kind of all-knowing, self-correcting God. With the input of enough self-interested actors, the truth can be dis­cerned. I’d argue that stock mar­kets are more like blogs (the highly-linked New York Times ver­sion of the arti­cle), with every­one rush­ing to make the same links (Asso­ci­at­ed Press).
The truth of the mat­ter is that recent intel­li­gence laps­es have been the result of polit­i­cal med­dling in the col­lec­tion and ana­lyt­i­cal process­es. When the boss wants a cer­tain result (proof of weapons in Iraq, proof of Al Qae­da links), then the group-think pres­sure to con­form will warp the sift­ing process. A stock market-style sys­tem for pre­dict­ing ter­ror would be about as accu­rate as a poll of CNN and Fox News watch­ers – it will tell you what every­one thinks but it prob­a­bly won’t tell you the truth.