I look around the walls at elementary schools, at fingerprint-smudged portraits of stick figures and blue-painted ladybugs, and scrawled underneath each budding attempt is invariably: Caitlin.
Or Hunter, or McKenzie, or Tyler, or some other pseudo-trendy name that alledgedly loving parents affix to their hapless offspring. It baffles me why parents would choose to name their children such things. I would sooner give the child up for adoption than name it, for example, Dylan. This homogenizing of names has got to stop. Pretty soon we’re going to see respectable white-haired politicians named Kayla or Brendan, and there won’t be a damn thing we can do about it.
Trendy names tend to come and go, I suppose. When my grandmother was born, names like Ethel and Margery were popular. In the 50s and 60s, there was a certain pool of names parents fished out of, resulting in today’s mothers named Susan, Carol, and Patty. Doubtless in a few years, parent-teacher meetings will be packed with Tiffanys and Jasons, all concerned over the scholastic acheivements of little Reece and Taylor (respective genders to be decided later).
Which brings up another subject. It used to be that only a select few boy’s names were considered acceptable, and parents stuck with more traditional labels with the Y-chromosome crowd (James, Steven, and William among them), while bestowing their real creativity on their daughters. Occasionally a gender-neutral name such as Leslie would pop up, but it was a rare occurance. Now it seems like nearly anything goes for both genders, resulting in atrocities like Saguaro or Peaches (yes, I have seen both of those names in schools...).
These errors in judgement are not just reserved for today’s youth. I have even met people--people who otherwise seemed like respectable, upstanding adults--named things like Latrine, Vanilla, and Tomain (the latter being a variety of poison). Granted that one cannot blame these individuals...the fault lies with their parents. It’s still a sad thing to see.
You can often tell which names are popular when simply by tuning in to your local soap operas. Invariably you will be watching a pair of actors in their late twenties to early thirties, named things like Amberleigh, Blake, Kirsten, or Tahoe, all arguing about who has slept with whom lately, and plotting to blackmail each other. This is where modern parents get their ideas about names. Whether the names are the cause of the disease, or just a symptom, I do not know.
The irony, of course, is that nobody in their adult years would be named anything even close to any of these things, because names like that have not existed before the mid-eighties at the earliest. You may notice that the characters already beginning to grey are the ones labelled Jennifer and Brandon, names already slightly passe.
Certain names tend to teeter on the edge of trendy, never quite reaching the stereotype: Jessica, Amanda, and Nicole are common enough in the halls of junior highs to be familiar, along with the Emilys and Angelas of the world. Boys’ names tend to withstand trends better, and are less fickle than girls’...once a male name has been established, it tends to retain its foothold, although Joshua, Jared and Kevin appear to be gradually losing their charm (I remember an adage among teachers being “They’re always named Kevin”, referring to the tendecy of boys with that name to be rather obstreperous).
Oh, and in case you’re wondering what names I would give my own children, for a boy it would be Benjamin Porter (the latter being a family name), and the girl has not been decided upon.
Like I plan on having kids anyway. *snort*