A Public Service Announcement: if you are middle-class and live in an area with a high proportion of Boden-wearers...

[PollyMorfic]

...you would be well-advised to take note.

Following my compulsory attendance at 7yo dd2's first music 'concert' (I use the term loosely, and yes I was bored) I whiled away the time doing a little research on the list of 'performers', which led to the following conclusion.

If you are middle-class and live in a reassuringly expensive but still very slightly boho area, possibly but not necessarily in London, and are currently pregnant with a girl, you are probably considering one of the following names:

Maya
Mia
Pia
Tia
Ella
Ellie
Lily
Lola
Evie
Edie
Esme
Izzy

These are all nice names. But everybody else thinks so too. So if you want to avoid in future years having half a dozen Boden-clad little mites do a double-take every time you call one of said names in a public place, you may wish to consider branching out a bit.

Eye thang yew.

Lovely - all names you listed are just as predictable and lacking in originality within their own group.

jonicomelately No prizes for guessing which class you belong to [hmmm]

Northernlurker I don't know any Beatrices;

I know one Daisy.

The only non-council names on that list are Edie and Esme.

I could every single one of the others with a carefully aimed bar of soap from my bathroom window

Yeah, Polly Toynbee, obviously. I was thinking of kids rather than adults. But la Toynbee's actual first name is Mary, according to Wiki -- for some reason Polly used to be a diminutive of Mary.

The whole pet-names-as-given-names thing is a more recent trend. I did meet someone on the post-natal ward with a little newborn, who was apparently called Bill. Not William, just Bill. I kind of liked it one one level, but also thought .

And Isolde is bang on trend, I know two under the age of 5 in North Oxford, and another one in North London. And there seems to be a rule that says if you have any hyphenated name, the second part must be Mae. There's a hell of a lot of it about.

Amelia and Edward are classic rather than trendy, I think.

About three weeks ago on a postnatal ward I met 3 babies called David. Most unusual. One was East European, the other mum said after her brother and another one after her Dad.

I think Mae is today's Rose or Grace as middle names go.

When I was little the obligatory middle names were Jane or Louise.

I do think it's fascinating the way that people, all apparently independently, decide to give their newborn a particular distinctive name. Only to find five years later that fifteen thousand people had the exact same idea at the same time, and half the reception class now answers to their child's 'unusual' name.

We nearly fell victim to this when I was pg with ds 13 years ago. I had been told we were expecting a girl, and we fixed on Freya as a name, which I'd heard years before and mentally reserved for a future child. Luckily for us he was a boy, so we had to come up with something else, because much as I still love the name Freya, there's a hell of a lot of it about.

Agree Polly -I find it fascinating that we are all drawn to similar names - often thinking we are original and quirky before the awful realisation dawns that we are just like everybody else . I have met new parents who genuinely think they are being "out there" by choosing names like Finn and Oscar because they were rare when we were all children.

Yes, thank you to dh's cousin who 'stole' the name Hannah from me 18 months before my dd was born. It was my granny's name and I had had my eye on it for many years, and had never met another. If we hadn't changed our minds, she would have been one of 4 Hannah's in her year at school! (I still like the name, and don't wish to offend any Hannah-mamas. Well, except dh's cousin, but that's another story...!)

Kerala: I agree. The snag is, that you don't know where the herd is going until it's too late. The list in OP showed the choices of a group (however defined) about 7 years ago. It doesn't really show what people are choosing now - and you only really find out when your children start school.

I have a DD with one of the names in the OP list.

In my defence she is a fair bit older than the herd of them chasing at her heels. When we named her most people asked us if we had made it up!

She never liked her name till it got popular, funnily enough now she knows some more she likes it! LOL

We only buy the odd bit of Boden in the Sale - does that count as MC?

well it must be on the way down as one of my poshest friends has stopped buying it...

How does the long name / short name thing level up with us? We have an Elizabeth Tess ... who we always call Tess - does this make her more common than if we always referred to her as Elizabeth?

Though by the time we'd got to the end of Elizabeth there wouldn't probably be enough time to save her from whatever madcap activity led us to be calling her name in the first place of course! Think we'll stick to the shorter 'Tess' if only for safety reasons...

It is odd how people follow the herd without realising it.

So, do you think the offspring of parents who were well ahead of the trend will benefit from people assuming they are younger than they really are? Thinking of some friends who have a Finn - only he's old enough to be a junior doctor. It must have sounded very rebellious and creative when they did it (the father's an Old Etonian). Now Finns and Finlays are two a penny.

Am v glad we opted to honour ds's family history with a Welsh name. He's the only one in his school ? makes naming his clothes and bags very easy. But because I'm so used to Welsh names despite living in England, I have no idea what sort of image they conjure in other people's minds, and whether a young Owen or Bryn or Evan or Gryff or Lloyd sounds posh or common or middle.

I have recently conducted research on a council house estate, not for the purpose of discovering which names are WC but in the process it has been apparent that some names don't fit the sterotypical media ideas of what WC children's names are.

The parents have names that one would expect to be WC, for example, Tracey, Barry, Natalie, Denise, Sharon, Jodie, Tony, Eli, Brian etc however some of the children's names could just as easily be found in back pages of Tatler (some pushy, new money in there too, though ). There were a few Williams and Harrys, a Katherine of two years old, as well as the names George, Jane, Nanci, Lydia, Douglas, James, Dominic, Christopher, Alex, Sophie, Louise, Lois, Thomas and John. As another poster has said the WC have always imitated the UC and perhaps it is emphasised now by the use of the internet allowing them access to forums where other socio-economic groups give them ideas for names they would like to use, in addition to OK, Hello and other gossip pages. There were of course some names that were more suspect like Ruby-Mae, Chloe-Mae, Elise (Alice hasn't yet caught on but the day is drawing closer), Scarlett and Chelsi but they were in the minority. In these households, A-level and degree attainment (even from the ex-polis) was almost nil, I saw many large plasma screen tvs but no sign of a book or piano. Many expected their offspring to attend 'uni' without knowing exactly what it would entail or what they would like to study. I'm only including the last sentences to indicate that these aren't from households where welfare is occasional or new but where generations have grown accustomed to reliance on government help so the attraction of traditional names when the the prime source of outside information is the 'plasma' permanently stuck on ITV and MTV may be faintly surprising.

Partial, I have to ask, isn't Tess a diminutive of Elizabeth? I thought Bess and Tess were both from Elizabeth. The only Tess I've ever known was Elizabeth but maybe that wasn't quite right.

I'm just curious as I too, have an Elizabeth.

Or is it from Theresa? Sorry for thread hijack, just curious.

I have an Esme.
The poster who said she couldn't imagine Esme MP can fuck right off.
To find my dtr's name being denegrated in such a way (and I don't mean the class thing as anyone who bothers about that sort of thing surely doesn't have any class) is insulting in the extreme.
Oh and whilst we are probably perceived as mc, we do NOT wear Boden. Just to be different, you know...

Ladycee I don't think there's any chance of you being mistaken as MC.

sorry, that should say perceived as, not mistaken.

^^ not sure how to take that
is it cos we don't wear boden or cos our litl'un is named Esme? Or both?
Or have you got your tongue in your cheek?
Actually, this thread has put me in a bad mood.

Actually Gorgeous, having looked at your posts again, I realise it wasn't a tongue in cheek comment.
I can only assume your judgy knickers are too tight.
Fwiw, I said perceived as we 'seem to tick all the boxes'. Fundamentally, we believe the class thing is a pile of tosh and allows people (much like the majority of posters on this thread) to hide behind an illusion of superiority.

This thread has made me feel ill.

Mee too flower38.