Why do people give such basic names that will be an administrative nightmare?

[ThatFraggle]

If you have a 'bog standard' surname, why would you give your child a bog standard first AND middle name?

I'm not saying you have to call them Fifi-Tinkerbelle, but why put the person in a position that there will be dozens of people with the same name and date of birth. E.g. A name from the most popular names, (Chloe, Liam, Jack, etc.) plus common surnames (Smith etc.)

At least go for a middle name like Esmeralda, or Phoenix or whatever you feel like. You can have two middle names if you really want granddad Henry to be honoured in the name.

But they're less likely to have the same year of birth, or even identical date of birth, than if you've chosen a top ten first name to go with your top ten last name.

You can literally Google in the 3 months before you give birth which names have been trending at the registrar's.

Well it is. If nobody used any of the names from the top 10, the top 10 in the next few years would change to reflect the new most popular names. Olivia may not be top 10 anymore, but whatever name was newly popular would be. Some kids will always have more popular names.

Obviously the 2022/2023 top 10 would be the same, but the following years would reflect the change. So it wouldn’t really get round any of the imaginary issues of having a popular name.

But it's not 'nobody'. It's the people with the modal surnames. Changes in their choices in terms of volume will be insufficient to sway existing trends.

I taught five Alexanders two years ago.

I see, so how unusual does your surname have to be before you’re allowed to name your child Olivia? I mean even if your surname is not super common, you are likely to meet others who share it, and they might also use the common names from the top 10.

Really not unusual at all to have three of one name in a class and I can think of quite a few examples of four plus - I recently had a class with four Jacobs and two Jakes, and about five years ago I had four very quiet Emilys with identical hairstyles. In secondary schools which set by ability you get concentrated pockets of social and cultural markers in your classes, including names.

Indeed. This was a top Maths set in a leafy suburb.

YABU

As someone born with a first name that has multiple spellings and a surname that literally no one can spell, I was very happy to swap the latter for a boring English surname that everyone knows. No administrative nightmares have occurred.

This isn’t AIBU!

Not rtft but I was out with some people just yesterday who were talking about this. Two of them were teachers and bemoaning the fact that they had several children in the class with the same first and middle names and same initial for the surname. Amelia Rose was their particular bugbear.
I work in a GP surgery and, out of around 15k patients, we have 24 "pairs" where there is an identical first name, surname and date of birth - so they have to be flagged. Several of them are names from a particular part of the world; the majority are just bog standard "Paul Smith" type names.
I do think it's reasonable to consider how common a name is likely to be before picking it - though of course then it's sods' law that the only other Mildred born that year happens to be in the same town.
And it's daft to say that common names are better than made up ones - that's true in my opinion but there are several thousand options between top 20 and made up...

I said very unusual, not never happens.

I'm assuming you don't teach 5 Alexander's or 4 Emily's every year?

I do think that's a fair point actually about certain areas having names that will be more popular than other areas.

I wouldn't necessarily say that they are always going to be the top 10-20 names nationally though, especially going forward.

I was just going by how many live births per year vs how many babies are actually given the current most popular names vs a typical class size.

Having recently been doing some family tree research I wish people would've been much more adventurous with names in generations gone by. practically every man was a James, Charles, John or William women were always Elizabeth, Alice, Ann making finding the correct documents incredibly difficult.
there is a much much wider variety of names these days. I do think names become very boring when they become too popular like Ellie and chloe etc. having said that my ds name is now top 10 but was quite uncommon when I chose it for him years ago.

YANBU just ask Ian (H) Watkins how he felt being mistaken for Ian (Lost Prophets) Watkins!!

Not really, it's just the same as asking Steven with a V or a PH, or the difference between spellings of Eleanor or Ann (with or without an E) etc

Emmerdale? EastEnders?

Otherwise I have no idea what we are missing

Ignoring the hyperbole of 'administrative nightmare' 😳 - the nightmare is having to spell ridiculous 'unique' names forever.

I agree. In my old job I had to effectively stalk people online to find info out about them. People with unusual names have a huge digital footprint and it's very easy to find out so much about them.

I agree with you OP - I nearly got the wrong dental treatment once because there were two of us on record with exactly the same name. One purpose of middle names is to give people a further point of differentiation - if names don't actually do this, what's the point?

As pp have said, why create a false dichotomy? Why pretend the only alternative to John Smith is a Younique name? Baby name books are not just a sheet of A4 paper, after all.

And all I said was to avoid top ten names if you also have a very common surname.