Kermit was just another name before Kermit the Frog came along. Nothing against Kermit the Frog, but I would imagine that very few kids are named Kermit now. What are some other examples of names that are so closely associated with popular characters that the name is now rarely used in real life?
Is this thread strictly limited to characters? I can’t imagine many kids are named Adolph today.
I know a couple of Rons, but I imagine Ronald McDonald and Ron Burgandy may have ruined the name, or at least ruined the childhood of those so named.
Well, Kermit is not quite as retired as you might think In fact, I was hanging out at the savings and loan the other day when a short fellow with visible webbing betweenst his fingers came in and went to the Customer Service desk. I knew the fellow occupying the desk, a wacky Irishman named Paddy O’Sullivan, MBA and lots of serious attentive service behind yon desk, don’t get me wrong, but a little nutso in his private life for which we dubbed him Paddy-wack, dig? So little Mr. short-n-webby comes in and says he wants to borrow 85K short-term at reasonable interest rates (which I am overhearing only because I happen to be nearby and they aren’t whispering, I don’t eavesdropl, hey?). Paddy, he asks the usual form-filling stuff, and he of the webbed appendage, he says his name is Kermit, OK? Kermit Jagger to be precise. And ol’ Wack, he notes that down. Address. City. Next of kin? Now get this: yeah, it’s that Jagger, can you believe it? This amphibious fellow is ol’ Mick’s kid. Now Paddy, he’s a Mick, he’s got kids, and you know he digs Wild Horses, I mean who wouldn’t? So all is cool, until like he has to ask for some collateral for the 8 point 5, I mean that’s his job, right? Well, looking kinda green…actually he always did, come to think of it, but looking kind of amphibiously ambivalent or even a little hopped off, this Kermit Jagger fella comes forth with this little carved trinket, and thunks it on the counter and acts like that ought to settle things once and for all. So I’m watching and Patso does the office-intercom thing, buzzes the supe, you know? And this tall surly dude comes in and takes a look at the forms and the little carved whatsit, and he says in considerable annoyance “It’s a knick-knack, Paddy-Wack, give the frog a loan! His old man’s a Rolling Stone!”
yeah, well if you already heard it, what you doing reading this far, huh?
I must know, how many years have you waited to use that?
I knew what it was building towards and still laughed at the punchline. Excellent job.
Jim
Hmm, interesting point. Kermit still seems like a better name to me than some of the crazy stuff people name their kids nowadays, though.
Other examples? Uh…I’d imagine that anyone named Homer nowadays would get tired of Simpsons references pretty fast.
If we’re counting real people, I suspect that devout Catholics are far less likely to name their daughters Madonna nowadays than they might have otherwise (not that it was ever a terribly common name in the first place). Cher is probably off-limits for normal people for at least a few more decades too.
Harry Potter fans may keep the name alive. Not that that’d undo the damage to currently-young Rons.
My girlfriend told me the same joke last night and I couldn’t believe the coincidence. 
First you would have to show that Kermit didn’t just kinda die off on it’s own. Perhaps Kermit the Frog had nothing to do with it.
If you had asked this in GQ, Walloon or Exapno Mapcase would have come in by now with a statistical analysis from the Social Security Database showing you how many people had that name, year-by-year since 1920!!
Just a curmudgeon from GQ. 
I heard once that Richard Nixon pretty much single-handedly killed off the name Richard, but I can’t help but wonder if the nickname “Dick” is what did it in.
I think it is the nickname.
If Walloon or Exapno were here, they’d link to this site. It would show you that Richard had already been losing popularity for 30 years before Nixon, and that if anything the decline seemed to slow a little in the 70s. And Kermit lost its popularity way before the Frog came along.
You wonder why Kermit exploded in baby’s names between 1890-1910?
“Adolf” probably isn’t going great guns as a name these days.
“Homer”, maybe?
Elvis kind of has a lot of baggage.
I once knew a kid named Linus. People were always asking him where his blanket was. He didn’t think it was funny, like, at all.
Yeah, but it’s on the charts anyway.
Some folks now alive might think that Kermit The Frog (same middle name as Jack The Ripper) was around since the beginning of time. Not so. When I first learned that President Teddy Roosevelt had a son named Kermit, it was the first Kermit I had ever heard of. “What an odd name,” I thought. Kermit The Frog was not even Kermit The Tadpole at that point. I still have never met anyone named Kermit, neither frog nor human.
Even in Teddy Roosevelt’s day, Kermit was not a common first name. He gave his son that name because his wife’s maiden name was Edith Kermit Carow. Kermit was, presumably, the maiden name of her own mother.
“Orenthal” is pretty much unusable now.
Unfortunatey, “Osama” is not.
I think that at some recent time, it was the third most common name in the Islamic world, so even if it suddenly became unpopular, I don’t think you’d be able to tell yet. Although I suspect we’re talking at cross purposes.
The Lutheran church I attended as a kid was loaded with old men named Elmer. The name probably went extinct after Elmer Fudd was created.
I wonder how many kids nowadays get named Bruce, considering how that name – really, 'Bruth" – is now considered the quintessential “gay name”. I wonder if Lance and Todd got hit by their stereotypically gay association as well.