Over the phone line, I could hear my friend Hilary clacking desperately at her keyboard. As her self-appointed "naming doula," I'd just recommended Charlotte for her firstborn, who was at the time still about a month away from delivery.
"Are you kidding?" she shrieked. "Charlotte was 174th for 2004—and it's only on the rise." She was looking at the graph of the name's popularity on NameVoyager, at The Baby Name Wizard. Like so many expectant mothers, Hilary was spending essentially her entire pregnancy searching for a name that would perfectly capture how lovable and original her daughter would be, and the Internet was only feeding her frenzy.
In the past few years, the proliferation of sites devoted to naming trends and popularity rankings seems to have turned baby names from something you need to think over to something you need to overthink. Adding to the second-guessing these websites can inspire is the minute-by-minute coverage of celebrities' babies in weekly gossip magazines and online news sites. After all, nobody wants to be seen as one of those mothers who named her kid Cody or Cassidy just because Kathie Lee did. And of course there's the inescapable trend of customization in our consumer lives, which leads us to think we shouldn't settle for anything less than unique for our kids' names (pick an adjective, any adjective). Have baby names really become the latest way to express personal style? Is toting a kid called Django on your hip akin in some ways to wearing J Brand jeans on said hip?
"Parents, probably much more than they care to admit, are sending a signal with the name they give their child—a signal to their family and friends about how hip or traditional or culturally aware they are," says Stephen J. Dubner, coauthor of Freakonomics, which includes a fascinating chapter on baby names and race. "With parents, you see it most plainly when they tell a stranger the baby's name and wait expectantly for a positive reaction. There's nothing so sad as the sight of a new mom telling the grocer her baby's name is Atticus, then becoming crestfallen at the blank stare she receives." (For the record: Given the more than 30 million copies sold, you aren't the only one moved so deeply by To Kill a Mockingbird that you feel compelled to honor its message by naming your kid Atticus, Scout, Jem, Boo, Dill, or Harper.)
"I always thought I'd name my daughter Scout until Demi Moore did," Hilary now says ruefully. To illustrate the harried naming process, she explains the throes of considering Harper: "I love the name, I love Harper Lee—but two things turned me off: the new biography out about her, and Catherine Keener's Oscar-nominated turn in Capote. The risk seemed too high that it would get too popular. I feared it might be the next Madison."
