It’s been awhile since I’ve linked to Laura Wattenberg’s excellent baby name blog. Here’s a fun recent item on how one man launched a generation of baby names.
Wattenberg writes:
Some more highlights from Willson’s roster of custom-named clients:
Rad Fulton
Cal Bolder
Rand Saxon
Race Gentry
Chance Nesbitt
Dack Rambo
Van Williams
Dare Harris
Trax ColtonToday, the Willson names sound like clichés. They’re the kind of formula-hunk names skewered by The Simpsons’ “actor Troy McClure” and mimicked by countless gay porn stars. But it was Willson who defined that formula, and parents responded to its allure.
It’s a gay world. We just live in it.
Only 2 of the guys pictured are gay though. Maybe it’s a 50% gay world.
Jonathan:
Sure, but 50% gay is about 15 times more gay than the general population. So it still feels pretty gay.
Not all of these names take off with any kind of permanence, for whatever mysterious reasons.
Here’s the “spike” (9 per million) of Tab:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/baby-name/boy/tab
Interesting names but nothing to compare to someone like Sir Cloudesley Shovell. Now there’s a name to conjure with. He even has a band named after him.
Ian Flemming said in a Reader’s Digest interview that he chose James Bond (which was the name of an author of a bird book owned by Flemming) because it’s “brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon, and yet very masculine – just what I needed. I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, and ‘James Bond’ was much better than something more interesting, like ‘Peregrine Carruthers.’
“The name’s Carruthers. Peregrine Carruthers.” It does have a different ring to it.
And let’s not forget the real-world “Sir Stafford Cripps.” A BBC announcer once committed a Spoonerism and mentioned him as “Sir Stifford Crapps”, which led to an on-air collapse into laughter.
And finally along these lines, I’ll mention Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. A tough name to be a movie star with, I would have thought, but he had a good career.
Switching gears a bit:
Andrew has a friend named “Vance Maverick.” Andrew, how could you avoid mentioning that? I know the last name has three syllables, but still.
http://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2009/08/24/baseball_stats/
However, while Vin Diesel fits this naming scheme, I have not seen that starting a trend of Vin’s.