What's in a name?

Last night we had the rare treat of not only having our son’s family, with all four children, at our dinner table, but also my sister and one of my brothers were present for the meal. As many other family members, including my wife can attest, when I’m together with my siblings, the volume of the conversation at the dinner table raises. We grew up in a large family and are used to raising our voices in order to be heard. We have all grown up a bit since those days, however, and are a bit more polite. We have learned to listen a bit more and to not always raise our voices. Still, the meal was punctuated by lively conversation and a lot of laughter. At one point in the conversation we commented that none of us grandparent-aged people know any children the age of our grandchildren who share our names. The siblings who were at our table last night and I do not have names that were very common in our generation, but my wife, Susan, once had a grade school class with three or four children who shared that name. All of my remaining siblings and myself have family names, however, We knew the relatives whose names we shared. None of us, however, feel like our names need to be passed on to another generation. We’re happy with the names our children have chosen for their children.

Giving a baby a name is an emotionally charged process. Parents worry about giving a child the “wrong” name. Names are part of our identity. Names also are influenced by stereotypes and can have an impact on the types of jobs people pursue.

During the years that I was a pastor in Rapid City South Dakota, I made it a practice to spend a few minutes each year reading the names of the children who participated in the preschool that met at our church. Most years there were nearly a hundred children in the two- and three-day preschool programs. Over the years I read a lot of very unique names and many names that were more common, but featured unusual spellings. For example, I had to ask how to pronounce a name spelled La-a. It shares the pronunciation with a name spelled Ladasha. There were a lot of other unique names that showed up on the lists over the years.

Recently I read an article published by BBC that stated that research shows today’s rising popularity of unique baby names in many different cultures around the globe. The article asserted that the popularity of unique baby names reflects a move from collectivism to individualistic societies. Increasingly, the article claimed, parents value unique names that help their children stand out, instead of fit in.

This has not always been the case. In English-speaking countries in the 1800’s, the name Mary was the most popular name for girls by such a wide margin that there were more girls named Mary than the total of the next three most common names: Anna, Emma and Elizabeth. When it came to boys, John and William were the most popular names, followed at a large distance by James, George and Charles. Choosing a common and easily-recognized name was very popular in those days. A boy was over one hundred times as likely to be named John as Phillip in England at that time.

In fact, John and William were to top boy names for over 700 years from the 1200s to the 1930s. In the 1600s the top three names for boys and girls accounted for fully half of England’s population. Naming traditions were founded in religious and ancestral ties.

When our generation came along, however, the culture had shifted. While we tended to have family names, we did not tend to pass those names on to our children. Pamela Redmond, who published a book titled “Beyond Jennifer and Jason” in 1988, wrote, “The Baby Boomers were the first parents who wanted to be cool, and who wanted their children to be cool as well.”

Our millennial children have taken it a step farther. They grew up with the rise of the Internet - a unique social system in which a username became a unique identifier. Annual rankings of popular names made people feel competitive. But instead of wanting to be number one, everybody wanted to avoid the top of the charts. Today’s parents want to express a unique style and their own personal values in the names they choose.

This trend away from traditional names toward unique baby names is happening in other places around the world as well. Japan has been a traditional, collectivist society for centuries, but even there researchers are finding a shift away from naming traditions. According to a 2021 study of 8,000 baby names between 2004 and 2018, the rate of unique names is rising in Japan. Researches believe that it is an indicator of rising individualism in the culture. Although I do not speak or read Japanese, I am aware that the use of characters stemming from Chinese means that the same set of characters can have different meanings. There are at least 18 different ways to pronounce the boy’s name 大翔, which can be read as Hiroto, Daisho and Sora amongst others. There are 14 for the girl’s name 結愛, like Yua, Yunari or Meia. Parents choose unique variations of names by abbreviating common readings of Chinese characters, choosing less common characters or reading them with different pronunciations. Similar studies conducted in China also show an increase in unique baby names. Parents want their children to be independent, unique and autonomous.

I believe, however, that unique names are not always the ticket to success that parents want them to be. I suspect that there is less stigma attached to names in this generation than was the case in some previous generations. There are plenty of successful people who have very common names. Far more important than what name a child receives is the love with which that name is given. When parents surround their children with love they are passing on the values of previous generations regardless of the name by which their child is called.

All the same, I have been known to remind my nieces and nephews that I was named for a great uncle and it wouldn’t be out of line for one of them to give my name to one of their children. So far, I haven’t had anyone take me up on the suggestion. And I’m not getting my expectations up, either.

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