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Name Media

Another Bad Baby Name Avoided!

Two days ago, my wife (who rocks, by the way) gave birth to our second son:

What did we name him?

Dungeon Dragon Gygax of course.

…

Just kidding. Actually, his name’s Eli. Man, wouldn’t it rock to have a kid named Dungeon Dragon? According to my co-author, Michael Sherrod, men often want to name their kids funny things, which is why I say that and my awesome wife rolls her eyes. (Michael’s example is giving your kid the middle name “danger.” No really, check out the article about us in the New York Times, if you haven’t already. I just saw it today because, well, my wife was having a baby.)

Incidentally, there is no one in the U.S. federal census named Dungeon and only a smattering of Dragons. Too bad, I guess.

Posted: March 12th, 2008 under Name Media, Nothing Special.
Comments: 10

Interviews

Here are a couple of videos of different interviews I did in Utah to promote the book. I’m sort of a shy guy and this is a little humiliating, but I hope you enjoy them.

Good Things Utah, ABC

Morning News, CBS

Posted: March 7th, 2008 under Book, Name Media.
Comments: 1

Unique? I Think Not

So, here’s an article from an Alberta newspaper about naming trends in Alberta over 2007. A substantial part of the article discusses a variety of “unique” names that popped up over the course of the year. Well, as any good editor will tell you, the word “unique” doesn’t mean “uncommon.” It means “one-of-a-kind.” So I decided to delve into the census records at Ancestry.com to see how many of these names actually were unique. Not surprisingly, almost none of them. Now for you purists, I didn’t look at every single instance of these names, so these numbers are more like broad strokes (okay, for you pure purists, we’ll say broad broad strokes :)). Also, it’s really hard to search for names by gender, so there may be some crossover there too. Either way, unique is not in the eye of the beholder. Take a look (the numbers in brackets are the number of hits in the Ancestry.com census database):

“Among the most interesting names for girls in 2007 were Princess [3,293], Psalms [no Psalms, but 11 Psalm], Rhapsody [4], Oakley [14,779], Kalifornia [none with a K], God’s [9 Gods (none with the apostrophe) and 491 God], Morning Star [3], Evening [116], Elektra [10], Creedance [unique!], Cassiopeia [1], Breaze [2], Blessing [495], Brazil [834], Cerenity [none with a C, 8 with an S], Chaos [28] and Raenbow-Roze [unique! sort of, see below]…

“There was no shortage of uncommon names for little boys in 2007 either. Topping the list is an Adonis [1,789], Blue-Quill [unique!], Corny [267], Felony [11], Furious [7], Geronimo [5,993], Gretzky [unique!], Hinton [5,862], Jackpine [8], Jesus [101, 382, though I’m sure a lot of these are Jesús], Kajun [unique!], Ivy [of course there were a lot of girls named this, but as I scanned the 159,763 entries, I did find a lot of men with this name too], Little [49,875], Maxxamillion [52 with one X], Milwaukee [11], Obsidian-Angel [unique! though there are 60,410 Angels], Rainbow [749], Salmon [8,689], Slim [1,671], Stylez [1], Tao [335] and Zero [896]. There were also three Blazes [723]….”