Baby names that will never make a come back

[pinkspaghetti]

I think there was a thread along these lines a few months ago but I couldn't find it so I thought I'd start another one.

Here are a few of the names that my friends' parents were called when I was growing up that I can't imagine anyone ever calling a baby........

Elaine
Yvonne
Jackie
Sheila
Pat
Pauline
Tina
Joan

Mark
Paul
Ray
Nigel
Alan
Ken
Neville
Brian

I also thought about highly unlikely names for baby twins in 2023 and came up with a few....

Malcolm and Wendy
Jason and Sandra
Russell and Paula
Gary and Judith

Any others?

My late husband's family have a family name handed down, father to son. It's a horrid name and I absolutely refused to use it. My father had an unusual name and I refused that too. I loved him to bits but wouldn't have saddled my kids with the name. He hated it too!

Yes he really does.... He gets called Wilf a lot too.. The year he was born there were only 14 Wilfreds registered. He is named after Wilfred Owen the war poet... My late DH also wanted an old fashioned name... The weird thing is we didn't realise he was deaf until he was two... The first man my husband worked for when he left school was a deaf man called Wilfred Riley!! 🤯

I know a 4 year old Roy and a 2 year old Malcolm. 🤔

Someone I know has called her baby “Baby” after Baby in Dirty Dancing which is her favourite film. Luckily she’s given her a proper middle name which I suspect Baby will use when she’s older.

I think the saint names that have stood the test of time will come back. Peter, Clare etc

@Sidge how do you keep a straight face sometimes with a really out there name?

@IsaiditwasLighthearted years of practice! Wearing a mask helps too 😂

I usually say oh that’s an unusual name, how did you come to choose it?

I used to work in a different area with some very unique name choices and found it hard to bite my tongue when I was corrected for pronouncing their baby’s name wrong. Not cultural names that I might struggle to pronounce (my pronunciation of Eastern European names has got better!) but people who decided to massacre a perfectly nice name with a very unique spelling.

When a mum got shirty because I mispronounced Reighyan I almost wanted to say love you’d better get used to it, she’s got a lifetime of this coming!

We think names cant possibly make a come back but they do, when i was at school,i had a friend called Grace ,i thought it was very old fashioned, this was in the 80,s now there,s loads of, them
Names like Ruby,and lilly were also old fashioned,not so much now!

I have a Mark and know of quite a few others............I didn't realise it was out of fashion.

I think names like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are classics and will never go permanently out of fashion.

I love the name Mark personally

When the name 'Brenda' is mentioned I automatically associate it with someone of ample cleavage

To be honest no name is superior to another. It's only what is associated with a name that makes it better / worse. Some things like not liking a name as it was the name of a childhood bully will put off an individual. Other things like it being the name of a criminal will put off a lot of people at the same time.

I genuinely noticed that when I started watching old episodes of Coronation Street, I started to appreciate some of the characters' names in a new way. It's because I was hearing the names over and over again and they were beginning to feel familiar.

Names like Paul and Gemma (for example) aren't very popular at the moment, in England. It isn't because they are ugly or bad though. They are popular in other countries right now.

Names just go in cycles and taste is subjective.. There are lots of names on this thread others have mentioned negatively that I think are fabulous.

Scotland has entered the chat

I know of a baby Paul, and Alan and a little girl named Wendy. All good names imo. Stand out from all the Olivia's and Noah's too.

Don't you understand it's because they sound old to YOU?

When I was having children, no one would have dreamed of calling a girl Emily, or Amelia, or Grace, or a boy Theo or Eric or Stan.

Because they were horribly old fashioned. To us. Then.

Exactly. I told the story upthread about my colleague's horror that her family's name for boys was Alfie and how we all sympathised with her. That was the 1980s. I suppose an equivalent today would be something like Barry or Wayne.
I do laugh when I see posters describing names such as Betty, Ronnie or Stan as 'gorgeous' when to my ear they're absolutely not and are the names of my friends' parents.
I do think there is a tendancy now to think this generation is the defining one and what ever is thought/done/recommended today will be set in stone for ever.
I don't think a lot realise many of today's Alfies. Evies, Millies and Erics will be forever defined as the names of the 2010s onwards, in the same way as the Donnas, Karens and Garys are forever tethered to the 1970s.
And the Dorises, Mangots and Percys will think Millie etc sounds dated.

Friend had grandparents named Fanny and Dick. These names haven't survived in succeeding generations.