Social Security Administration's List of the 1,000 Most Popular Baby Names
The About Hated Baby Names in America
When it comes to names, everybody's got an opinion. But while figuring out what names people like is pretty simple -- the U.S. Social Security Administration keeps a list of the nearly popular infant names each year -- figuring out what people hate is trickier.
Information technology turns out that in the example of names, honey and hate aren't mutually exclusive. A new informal survey of the nearly disliked names in America finds that popularity ofttimes breeds backlash, as a quick track to baby-proper name fame seems to too trigger hate for that name. Among the most-hated "trendy" names are Jayden, Brayden, Madison and Addison.
The most normally cited name that put people's teeth on border was Nevaeh, or "heaven" spelled astern. That name didn't exist until the 1990s, but it took off in popularity in 2003, shooting from the 150th virtually common baby name in that twelvemonth to the 31st most popular in 2007 (as of 2009, information technology stood at No. 34).
"Nevaeh in particular seems to stand equally this symbol … for what people don't like in modern baby names," Laura Wattenberg, writer of "The Baby Name Wizard: A Magical Method for Finding the Perfect Proper name for Your Baby" (Three Rivers Printing, 2005), told LiveScience.
The nearly hated baby names
Wattenberg did the informal survey of hated names for her blog, The Baby Proper name Wizard. She scoured general-involvement message boards online, looking for conversations about baby names that make people cringe. She included only two message boards that were specifically for babe names, because name enthusiasts tend to know trends and might skew the results. The other boards included a motorcycle travel forum, a video game fan lath and several parenting forums. The participants skewed female and under the age of sixty, Wattenberg said. All told, more than 1,500 names were cited. Wattenberg calculated which names came up the most. [Encounter the list of most hated boy and girl names]
Wattenberg is quick to point out that the survey isn't scientific, but it does have the advantage of capturing the names people spontaneously hate. A formal survey that gave people an option to rank names would probable bias people by putting ideas into their heads, Wattenberg said.
The survey also turned up a few interesting trends. The first is that people hate gender-angle names, particularly when a masculine proper name becomes feminine, as with Madison (which tied for second-well-nigh-hated for boys with 16 separate mentions) and Addison (which tied for sixth with eight mentions). They also hate names they tin't spell, including Kaitlyn, which got viii mentions and tied for 6th. (People say "Caitlin" is fine because it'due south traditional, Wattenberg said, though the original Irish gaelic pronunciation of that spelling would be closer to "Kathleen.")
Similar-sounding names that explode in popularity all at once usually become victims of their own success, Wattenberg found. The most hated boys' names -- Jayden, Brayden, Aiden and Kayden -- all rhyme and all shot upwardly from obscurity during the last decade. Among girls, a spate of "Mc"-names sparked annoyance: Mackenzie, McKenna and Makayla all made the top ten.
At the other end of the spectrum are people who hate ordinary names. This group is in the minority, but they pushed "Michael" into the top x most disliked names for boys.
"They really object to anything ordinary," Wattenberg said. "'Michael' or 'Matthew,' the boringness of those names infuriates them."
Easy versus unique
Baby names accept go more diverse in recent decades, said Jean Twenge, a San Diego psychology professor and author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Immature Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled -- and More Miserable Than Ever Earlier" (Free Press, 2007). In the 1950s, the summit 25 boys' names and elevation 50 girls' names were given to half of all babies born. Today, it would have the top 134 boys' names and top 320 girls' names to cover one-half of all babies born. [Read: Babe Names Reveal More than About Parents Than Ever Before]
Twenge, who wasn't involved in Wattenberg'due south survey, said in that location are two schools of thought when information technology comes to baby naming. On the ane side, there are parents who want their kids' names to stand out, she told LiveScience. On the other side are those who encounter names as a form of communication.
"Those are the people who are maxim, 'I don't like the weird spellings and I don't like the really strange names,'" Twenge said. "The common names are practiced because they're easy for other people."
The individualistic viewpoint seems to be more common, said Michael Varnum, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the University of Michigan. (Varnum said he "didn't have also much criminal offense" to his proper noun appearing on the most hated list.)
"Americans really prefer to not be particularly conventional or conformist in choosing names for their children," Varnum told LiveScience. That might assist explicate why names perceived every bit trendy, including Madison and Jayden, become so much detest: Jayden barely existed as a proper noun until the 1990s, and it now stands at No. 11 in the nigh pop boys' proper noun list.
Why names pop
No one actually understands why certain names of a sudden catch on in popularity -- or fall out of favor. According to Frank Nuessel, a University of Louisville professor and the editor of NAMES: A Periodical of Onomastics, one survey washed in the Britain plant that 40 percent of parents said their kickoff business in choosing a moniker for their child was how the name sounds. Another 38 percent said they looked to family tradition, while 10 percent said they used the name of a famous person.
In contempo decades, people have moved toward "whatsoever feels fresh," Wattenberg said. That means moving away from mutual names, and common sounds, from the previous couple of generations. That may explain why many people hate the names Gertrude and Bertha. Hard, Germanic consonants were once idea to convey opulence. At present, Wattenberg said, "nosotros live in an historic period of vowels," and poor, guttural Gertrude doesn't stand up a chance.
One caveat, Wattenberg said: "We're starting to run out of vowels. We've gone through the As and the Es, and now you're seeing more Os and Is. … Afterwards that there's going to be nowhere to turn with the vowels, so I'm curious to see if nosotros start to meet Gertrude and her friends a decade or and then down the line."
Wattenberg said the response to the almost hated proper name list has been and then potent that she's hoping to deport a more systematic survey of a larger, more defined sample of people. She doesn't want to label names "good" or "bad," she said, but it could be useful for parents to know how others volition react to their prospective name.
"Everybody is looking for this impossible dream, which is a proper noun that everybody knows, everybody loves and nobody is using," Wattenberg said. "As you can imagine, it just doesn't piece of work that manner."
Y'all can follow LiveScience due south enior writer Stephanie Pappas on Twitter @sipappas. Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience a nd on Facebook .
Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the man brain and behavior. She was previously a senior author for Live Science only is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly mag of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the Academy of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science advice from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/13923-hated-baby-names-america.html
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