To wonder why you would pick a name in the top 10?

[FreckledFrog]

So the latest top 100 baby names have been released this week. It has prompted me to wonder why on earth you would pick a name in the top 10-20 names.

There are thousands of beautiful, unique names out there, yet so many people are happy to pick the same names despite knowing their children will go to school with multiple Olivia's, Noah's, Amelia's or George's.

Do these people not desire some originality for their children?

Am I being unreasonable? I have a very very unusual name and have picked less common names for my children and I wonder if this clouds my judgement?

I thought the same Op. My small expensive village is awash with the top ten.

My son doesn't have an wacky name it's very old English, easy to spell etc. I really don't understand why people would chose top 10 name. Surely it will date you as much as the Carols, Keith's or Jason and Sharon's have?

My DC all have unusual names, but I want them to have interesting lives and achieve greatness and I felt that unusual and aspirational names would help facilitate this.

I really want to know: how do you think a name can lead anyone to have an interesting life?

OMFG. All that fucking fuss and sneering and it turns out the OP called her son James- a name which a cursory Google tells me has not left the top 20 at any point in the last 40 years.

I don't understand why parents don't want to give their child their own special name.

Do you realise that with about 600 000 children born every year in the UK this is simply not possible unless people start putting random letters together?

There will always be 10 most popular names and people who name their children with one of the 10 most popular names. For all sorts of reasons.

The extent to which people judge is ridiculous.

Are you seriously saying that you meet someone and you decide what they're like because of their name?

Or that someone tells you the name they're calling their child and your first thought is "why on EARTH would you be so unoriginal.

I'm quite surprised about the continued popularity of Jessica. I know it was popular ten years ago or so but I haven't heard of one for ages.

I too am a bit puzzled about the idea of an unusual or 'aspirational' name helping a child to achieve greatness. Try telling that to John Milton (or any number of other Johns, but he was the first I thought of), Marie and Pierre Curie, David Attenborough etc. That said, I do think that there's something of a statement in giving an unusual name that you hope for something a bit more than ordinary (so to speak) for the child.

I was given a generic (but rather MC) name of the 70s and with my own dc I'll admit I did go a bit for 'recognisable as a classic name but not with 3 in each class'. There were other considerations to do with pronunciation and internationality due to our bilingual make-up, but there were names I never even considered due to popularity. I would have loved to name dd Emily - it ticked all our boxes and would have sounded great with our surname -, but for some strange reason it is roaringly popular here in Germany, so it wasn't even in the running.

Don't forget not everyone had great access to the Internet the early part of the 2000s. I was still on dial up until 2006! I had no idea how many places my DD's name had risen in the previous year. I didn't have access ro that information. Parents now have all that information at their fingertips and still choose the same names in high numbers, which tells me high popularity is just not a big deal with a lot of parents.

There seems to be a handful of sweet spot names which aren't rising too fast, aren't going down too fast (lumbering your child with an outdated faddy name or catching the end of popularity) not a 100+ marmite name. But if we all applied that level of anaus is to choosing a name, we'd still all choose the same names!

Analysis

"I really don't understand why people would chose top 10 name. Surely it will date you as much as the Carols, Keith's or Jason and Sharon's have?"

Top 10 boys names include Thomas, Jack, Harry, Oliver. They're classic names! There are 90 year old Thomas' and Thomas' being born today. It's not going to date.

There are 17 Johns on the FTSE 100 CEO list.

There are 7 women.

Ergo it makes more sense to have an "ordinary" name than to continue being a women.

I don't understand why people keep having female children.

No-one has mentioned this yet, but the above post on 'John' hints at it- there is also proven discrimination against names that sound like they are from ethnic minority/black candidates, say on CVs to the point that many recruiters are now removing names from applications.

When people talk about 'unusual' being beneficial they tend to mean 'unusual' but nevertheless carrying all the middle-class signifiers possible (StJohn, Victoria, Cassandra etc) not unusual and possibly making someone stand out for racist discrimination. Something to think on...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306460317300576#bb0010

Ergo it makes more sense to have an "ordinary" name than to continue being a women. I don't understand why people keep having female children.

If you must continue having girls, send them to medicine or academia. Mind you, in 3 university hospitals I have dealings lots of the female academics or consultants are called Elizabeth, Catherine or Jane.

So there are your girls' names for medical success. Or perhaps they were part of the 1960s-1980s middles-class wave of Elizabeths, Catherines and Janes and their popular names haven't held them back.

Names like Thomas, Jack, Harry and Oliver were unpopular for years. I was at school in the 70s and 80s, and there wasn't a single child called these names. They were "old-fashioned" names. Oliver hasn't become trendy again until relatively recently.

Excellent point summer.
Btw dd1 would have been John if she had been a boy.
Classic name and not over popular.

It depends where you live.
I was at school with a Thomas and thought it very old fashioned at the time.
As per my previous post, I knew an Oliver who will be around 40 now and loved the name. This was purely baddd on the fact that as a baby he was beautiful. Therein lies the crux. I known at least one child who was named after me!
If you like the person you tend to like the name and vice versa.

It certainly doesn't seem to have held back John Oliver.

Two of mine have unusual names - one is fine because there are other people with the same name. The other seems to be pretty much unique and I can search on Google and find out what school they go to, what hobbies they have and what town they live in - none of this is because I have put anything about them on the Internet (I don't) but because their school has mentioned them by name on the website and so have three of the clubs that they are members of. The third one has a name like Jack Smith - we've learnt our lesson!

Boys of my generation - born mid '60s - were called Richard, Martin, Andrew and Nicholas - these were names that no doubt were considered classic, but you don't hear people calling babies these names today - though I suspect they're coming around again soon.

Leweji-less than 3 born with my name last year and it is a name, not just a collection of letters! 7 of my Daughter, 5 of my niece and 3 sons all under 200...none of these names I would say were particularly 'out there'.
I think to pick a top 10 name shows a very obvious need to conform. Or a lack of imagination. I haven't ever understood it to be honest.

daisy and (on our estate) Gavin, Wayne and Shaun. I always thought the Gavin in Gavin and Stacey was too young to be a Gavin.

less than 3 born with my name last year and it is a name, not just a collection of letters! 7 of my Daughter, 5 of my niece and 3 sons all under 200...none of these names I would say were particularly 'out there'.

But those names are not unique to those children, are they?
There will always be others with the same name .

Certainly not "their own special name."

I didn't say anything about 'unique', only that they are unusual-it's not hard to choose a name that isn't in the top 10.

Also- those under 200's name may suddenly get very popular in a way you can't predict.

I had a childhood of an unusual name that everyone said 'how do you spell that?' or 'why did your parents call you that, that's unusual?' then an adulthood of being Jane X at work as fashion turned and the next generation adopted the name and now every second person at my work is called my name!

What did you mean by "their own special name", then?