< clears throat >
Exactly!
Yeah, for the longest time, if I saw that someone was named Emma, I’d assume they were either a Brit or really old.
Some names stay popular in particular ethnic groups though. For example, my mom’s name was Irene and she had a sister named Martha (plus 5 other sibs), and I didn’t know anyone named either name except Latinas. Marta/Martha and Irene/Irena were quite popular names for even young Latinas.
Rather than try to hew too strongly to one side or the other, we tried to give our kids options. Because we have our views of the issue, but our kids views of the same issue could be very different. Neither of my parents go by their given first name, but found it upsetting when I changed mine. Go figure.
My son has a name that is very familiar, and for the past 120 years has stayed around the 200th most popular name. So, not super popular, but solidly familiar. He has a very unusual middle name for the US, but one that is amenable to a nickname that is a very common name. He goes by a short form of his first name.
My daughter’s name is extremely popular in another country, but virtually unheard of here. In 2020, there were only around 300 kids given the name. It had never entered the top 1000 before 2019. But, it has a nickname that’s in the top 30. She also has a familiar but not common middle name. She currently goes by the super common nickname, and regularly meets other kids with the same name. If she tires of that, she’ll have options.
All of the names are easy enough to pronounce. (Two of them might require a little help on the first try, but no one has had persistent trouble.)
Options are good.
There were a bunch of people whose r parents didn’t name them salmon, so they changed it themselves
For my daughter, we were able to get something that worked in Japanese, Chinese and English, but we couldn’t for my son, so he has both an English name which is uses in Japanese as well, and his Chinese name.
My daughter’s name is uncommon, but easy to spell and my son’s isn’t as common now but also not old fashioned or unheard of. It’s still in the top 200. We gave our daughter a very common middle name to balance out the uncommon first name. She likes both names so it worked out.
Victorian names have been popular for about twenty years in the UK. Apart from Lionel and Clementine. none of those would stand out as an unusual name for anyone between 0-25 in the UK. I know a Jasper and Clementine and have met tons of little and not-so-little Zebediahs.
The one stand-out thing in British naming culture right now is really really short names. You get the occasional very long name - again, Zebediah wouldn’t stand out - but it would be more common to meet a Zeb.
Apart from Mohammed, you have to go a fair way down to find a name that would stand out on a WWI war memorial. A couple do really stand out - interestingly enough more among the boys’ names - but it’s not a lot out of 100.
I remember some Americans laughing about Prince Harry and Meghan’s son being named Archie, but his name isn’t in the list because of them, really, it was already very popular here.
(Cosmo got their list from the Office For National Statistics, which I know because I’ve seen it - anyone can, but it’s not a link that’s as easy to see the top 100 for this year at a glance from as the Cosmo link).
I meant to say “apart from Lionel and Cordelia…”
I doubt what you name your child has a significant impact on their success in life. If their parents are middle class then Zorn Smith will probably also grow up to be middle class. Apple Martin (Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter) would likely not be any more or less successful at life were she named Susan or Marcia.
That is probably true for the child of a famous person. It may well be true in general. But not everyone or every parent has that perception, and that is the basis of the article.
If there is an effect it is probably indirect. And it probably no longer makes as big a difference as it once did. But there are certainly many times it has.
I named my son, born in '99, “Walker”. The name just came to me driving home from work not long before he was born; I got home and asked my wife if “Walker” was a name. She agreed it was, and not a bad choice, so we went with that. It suits him and he’s 23 now. This was a couple years before GWB was named president of the US. 
Darned kid walked at 9 months. 
Next kid (there won’t be a next kid) will be named Sleeper.
Speaking of Cosmo, I saw a plaque referencing this former Archbishop of York recently:
Not sure if Kramer brought the name back into fashion, but apparently there were real Cosmo’s out there.
I’ve seen Ezra, Jasper, Clementine, and Dorcas for baby names in my area in recent years.
There’s a 30-something woman in my apartment building named Bertha, which was my grandmother’s name, but my neighbor is definitely Hispanic and probably Puerto Rican, so that name wasn’t so unusual there.
I worked in a NICU for 32 years and random apostrophes were called “up top commas” by most parents that use them when naming their baby.
Yeah, a know a ton of Latinas who have what are often considered old-fashioned names (Martha, Helen, and, yes, Bertha).
According to a couple of documentaries I’ve watched, he started signing his paintings Vincent because everybody was mispronouncing his last name.
That’s funny, because in the UK Helen is a name that is not in the same generation as Martha and Bertha at all. Bertha and Martha are very much born before 1930 or born after 2000 names, but Helen is such a common name for people born in the 70s and 80s that they end up being called things like Tall Helen to differentiate from the other Helens.
I think our Helens may be your Heathers.
LOL. It’s always interesting to see which names catch on and which don’t.
And, I can’t believe I forgot! Another more common “old-fashioned” name among Latina women I know is Irene. And that was my mom’s name. Durr.
My name isn’t quite creative: it’s an anglicized foreign name (for which there was already a common English equivalent, but oh well). It conforms 100% to English spelling rules, and yet gives people no end of trouble. The most common assumption seems to be that it’s a creative spelling, so people ignore my pronunciation and go with what feels right to them.
For an equivalent, think “Mare.” People insist on correcting it to “Mary” or “Marie,” when it’s really a badly anglicized “Maria.” But it is in fact “Mare” and while that should be very easy for an English speaker to manage, it’s not.
I was really pleased to have a student yesterday introduce herself with her Chinese name, including a sound not made in English and a tone. It will take me a while to learn it, but I’ll do it: I’d so much rather have a Wü¹ (not the real name) called Wü¹ than a Wü¹ who feels compelled to call themselves “Roderick” for my benefit.
I’m seeing a lot of throw back names in little kids this year.
Evelyn, Karen (!!) Jane, Billy, Henry, David, Robert,Temperance, Claire, Charlotte, Emma, Ella, Fiona, Barnaby, Clifford, Camille, Vivian and Alice.
But then there’s also the imaginative Sturlyng, Izyk, Icesis, Rocklyn, Kenzleigh, Vail, Zyler.