The wrong era names....gaargh

[Mortgageportgage]

I'm reading a book set in the present time. The young teenagers are called Andrea and Janet. It's so confusing as I keep thinking these are the mothers not the daughters. I'm 40 and don't know a Janet or Andrea my age, let alone 25 years younger. Why do authors do this?

It was Fiona - Effie is fine, there are quite a few of them, and three times more Euphemias in the 1911 census (almost all protestants of various sorts).

That's what was maddening with MM - she is always called Effie except by older family members, so they really didn't need to do the Fiona nonsense.

She's named after his mum who died so that's a bit different. They call her Patsy.

Does Martina have a core readership? What is their age demographic?

I believe the name choices are to create 'universalness' so that readers identify with the young girl characters whatever the reader's age. More readers = more £££.

Perhaps the older character names also remind us that, although the situation presented is contemporary, it could/did arise, in previous generations. The mums and grandmas also faced gangs, exploitation, violence.

School cliques definitely exist. Then, now and always. Adults just rationalise them into nothing important long after leaving school.

Your 1913 story with popular 1910 names - I'm assuming you mean baby name lists? Wouldn't that risk inauthentic and anachronistic names for any character older than 10 in the story?

I recently read Luan Goldie's 'Nightingale Point'. Set in 1996 in a London tower block. A main character is called Pamela. She's a 16 year old girl. The name jarred me quite a lot, but perhaps born in c.1980 to oddball parents it's not so strange.

Pamela was separated from her ambivalent mother, resident with her paranoid father who locked her in their flat believing it safe. She was not allowed to run, her passion, to keep her away from her boyfriend. The unusual name really developed a character who had little choice or power in her life. Totally alone from her peers.

I know there are school cliques, it’s just not the same sort of thing as you get in American high school films.

Pamela might be anachronistic for a 16 year old girl in the mid 90s, but it’s not completely made up like Jaeryn is.

I mean, if someone asked me which clique I’d been in at school, I wouldn’t be able to give a name like “oh I was a jock/nerd/cheerleader/social outcast” or whatever.

The royal family didn't invent the name Victoria.
Queen Victoria was certainly who popularised it but's been a name for about 2000 years! There was a Saint Victoria in the 3rd century etc.

and a 2 second google found the same with Patricia - RF popularised it but it was already a name before then (also a saint in the 7th century)

I know a 20 something Janet.... completely missing the point of this thred!

It is annoying, I read a book a couple of years ago with two young people in it called Ray and Kath. More like their grandparents' names!

Not book characters but I found a curious name pattern while looking up occupants of my home. It was a block of six flats and maisonettes, some of which had two staircases (which might be relevant). I looked them up because the nightmare neighbour who had left but sublet, told his tenant that he had grown up there, and I was pretty sure he hadn't. (He moved there in my time and never said anything about it.)
Anyway, I got the electoral roll or the census for the years after it was built in the early 60s, and the earliest inhabitants had names of my grandparents generation, or between them and my parents. Albert and Winifred for example. And then they changed to a mixture of more modern names. And then the senior librarian said I couldn't do the research, I should never have been allowed. I was beginning to find the pattern of names more interesting than the neighbour, who had lied. Goodness knows why. But those documents would be a good source of names.

So do I! And a 42 year old one.

But then the only Pamela I know would have been a teen in the mid-90s, so perhaps I just know a lot of people with old-school style names.

The librarian is talking rubbish, these are documents available in the public domain. I have used them extensively for family history.

I live in London and some names which seem unusual here may have been popular in other countries at different times. I used to try and guess things about new temps etc when we given names before the women (or men) turned up. Sometimes I was surprised. For example there would be women from other countries who had been given what sounded like oddly old fashioned English names as well as Yoruba/Igbo or whatever names. But there was a young Swedish woman (who would probably be in her 40s now - this was probably 15-20 years ago!) with a very Victorian sounding woman's name. There was also a Kiwi Andrea of about the same age.

And an Afro-Caribbean Golda, named after an Israeli PM in the 1970s (who was American).

When my boys were little, I was amused by the number of oddly old fashioned names being used at baby groups.

The comedian Shaparak Khorsandi has joked a few times that her daughter says her friends have really old fashioned names compared to her daughter's mates like Mabel.

I have a friend my age called Grace - we would have both been teenagers in the mid 80s - we were born in a decade birthday year. She and her sister were given English names after midwives, and her mum's family kept saying she should give them Arab names. And where I live there are a surprising number of women called Grace.

The discussion of anglicised names is also interesting - my grandmother was Oonagh in Gaelic but her "official" name in early 20th century New Zealand and hence for the rest of her 85 years became Winifred. Which is rather different!

I think Winifred in the standard Anglicisation for Oonagh/Una.

Yes indeed, according both to Fr Wolfe and to Withycombe's Oxford Dictionary of English Christan Names. Evidently Agnes was also used as a variant form.

(Both better sources than 2 second google searches btw, which clearly give very mislelading results).

Wow, is it? I'd idly assumed it was a variant of Guinevere/Jennifer, and that Agnes was either a variant of Anne or related to lambs.

Winifred is a Welsh/British name in its own right, Agnes was a Roman Latin name from a Greek root. Both got used in Ireland as variant forms of the Irish Una.

Its like blokes in Ireland getting called Jeremiah instead of Diarmuid, or Cornelius instead or Conor.

Ah, that makes sense.