Malcolm, Sandra, Pauline, Geraldine, Gillian, Jeannette, Muriel, maureen, moira, are actually still perfectly normal names here in Scotland. Maybe the accent makes them cooler?
“Moira will always be around as long as The Scotch are.” Ahem...scotch is a drink we’re Scots thank you.
Some names though I really agree and some names that are perfectly ok on an adult but I can’t imagine them working on a cute little baby!
Also perceptions of certain generations of what’s “old fashioned” isn’t seen the same way by other generations
Eg for me being a 70’s born Sharon and Tracy are “common” Clare (and all the spellings!), Samantha and Julie/Julia were just so overused by our generations parents they’re just boring and lacking in personality to us. Boy equivalents Keith, Kevin, Brian, Wayne, Duane, Stephen (so many Steve’s in my generation it’s ridiculous!)
For my mums generation they viewed names like Margaret, Dorothy, Doreen, daisy, iris, Vera
Some the meanings have changed so they’re now unusable:
Dick, fanny, roger, Gaye and similar
But I look at my dds friends list on fb...
SO many of them have the SAME names! Seriously the parents around here really lack imagination!
2000+ friends only 35 (I just checked out of curiosity) different actual names (admittedly I’ve grouped the same names different spellings eg Abby/Abbie into one name) so that’s 50-60 friends on average who all have the same name and a lot of them know each other. In addition an awful lot of the boy/girl siblings have essentially the same names or even almost exactly the same name! Eg Alec/Alex. How boring!
A few do have truly unique names in that list but none have really unusual names.
These are school friends, work friends, hobby friends but I must admit also of course include my family who have boring names too.
Partly cultural as we’re catholic living in a largely catholic area, and also a deprived area so very few incomers so lots of saint names and family names passed down.
There’s no telling where a fad will come from - I know at least 3 late 20’s kylie’s and a couple of Whitney’s I predict future similar oddities of Florence thanks to Florence and the machine, Adele...maybe there’s some Beyoncé’s and Miley’s out there?
We actually got caught out with dds name, chose a Scots name that wasn’t very common but was not so unusual it wouldn’t be known with an easy spelling...it exploded the following year thanks to an unexpected rise of a few celebs with the same name! So that when she went to school she was one of many which we absolutely could not have predicted!
She hates it at the moment (hoping she comes not to) BECAUSE for her generation it’s become like Sharon, Tracey etc are for my generation.