There is a long history of names starting out as family names, then being used as boys’ names, then for either sex and then used pretty much exclusively for girls. The names Evelyn, Shirley, Gale, come to mind, but there are many others. Leslie and Randy have moved strongly in that direction.
One day, maybe about 35 years ago, my son came home from school saying that a new girl named McMillion had joined his class. My wife said to him: I am almost certain that it is McMillan and that they family is southern. And so it proved. They were from Alabama.
For new names, my cousin’s daughter recently named her daughter Camden because her husband had proposed at Camden Yards. To my surprise the cellist in the string quartet we heard last Friday and Sunday is named Camden Shaw.
Nitpick: Cameron and Finley are surnames. And the fact that you think of them as forenames shows that the practice of assigning surnames as forenames is not one that has only developed “in modern times”
Name nerds say Finley etc are not “legit” whatever that might mean.
I love how the intellectual elite crave the support of the working class but then call them “chavs”, “bogans” etc, which ensures they will never get that support.
Well, when I named my girls I wanted something that was
a) classic (no alternative spellings)
b) was not high up the popularity name of the year list
c) their Chinese names became their middle names.
I am male and grew up with first name = female 99.0% of the time, middle name being a common new testament name that was commonly used. I don’t recommend that parents get out their with the first name, especially in the computer age. Jus’ sayin’
My wife is named after her dad. My mother-in-law told me once she did it out of spit, because he was out getting drunk while she was in the hospital squeezing her out.
Mercedes has been a girl’s name since, like, forever. At least one queen of Spain was so named, and there are fictional Mercedes’s in The Count of Monte Cristo and in Bizet’s Carmen.
The car marque was named after Mercedes Jellinek, the 11-year old daughter of the designer Emil Jellinek.
Recently, some A-list celebrity named her new baby daughter James. I know I shouldn’t judge, and most of my fellow Americans seem to think its fine to name your kid anything up to and including Late-For-Dinner, but come on now, really. James? Why would anyone do this? I do object to unconventional or gender-contrary names whose main objective is apparently for the parents to show off their “creativity”.
Notwithstanding what I just said, I’ve read somewhere that giving old family names like Taylor, Campbell, Madison, etc., to girls is a time-honored tradition in the Northeastern “old money” WASP milieu. I believe it’s often the mother’s maiden name that’s given in these instances. (I know, “Madison” for girls did become more popular with the movie Splash, but i think it must have been used the “old” way before then. )
Showing once again that Spanish names like Fernando, Juanita, and Mercedes were surprisingly popular in the 19th century non-Hispanic America and Europe. Fernando Wood, a nineteenth-century mayor of NYC, always comes to mind when I think of this.
Now you’ve found my sore point. I don’t care what people call their kids, but giving them made up spellings drives me crazy. Look, sweetheart, you named your child Vicky, which is a really common name, spelling it ‘Viki’ does not make it special, it just creates a headache for your child.
Names are a weird thing. I get a bit anti-made up names, but really when I have to think about it, all names are made up, and came from weird sources originally. It’s just all about the sounds they make, and how pleasing it is in the current zeitgeist.
For some reason, some names sound masculine, some more feminine, partially due to tradition and partially to their mellifluousness to modern ears. I do like the idea of being able to assume gender from someone’s name, but that’s just personal preference. As long as you aren’t being deliberately provocative or stupid with choice of name, do whatever you like.
I have seen this at first hand. My daughter’s name (Isla) was, we thought reasonably unusual but not too far-out weird. Within two years of her being named it was in the top 10, and by 2015 it was number 3 in Britain.
Yeah - every once in a while I think about whether or not I like my name (I’m something like the 5th or 6th). I mean, it is fine, and lets me know when someone is calling me, but my preferred shortform is just a monosyllable - little more than a grunt. A weird vocalization to either like or dislike.
I often think it curious when someone expresses a strong preference for a longer, more formal form of their name. One rich kid in college insisted that he was Charles. So, of course, we always greeted him with, “What’s upchuck?”
With my eldest, my wife decided at the last minute not to use the name we had chosen. So I said, “Why not name her after my favorite song?” At the time, I knew no females of any age named Alison. But through grade school, there were never fewer than 2-4 Alyssas, Allisons, Alisons, Alysons… To this day, she goes by Al.
