Welcome to the world, Olivia (#5), just born yesterday! She joins big sister Sofia (#52), a member of Isaac's (#50) playgroup. We have another Sophia (#11) in our playgroup, too, and soon to be born is my cousin's daughter Sophie (#134).
The numbers are, of course, the ranking of the names' popularity for children born in the United States in 2005. If you spend any time researching baby names, you discover that modern parents often say they don't want to give their children names that will be too common. How common is too common? Let's put it this way -- of the five women who regularly bring their kids to our playgroup, three of us are named Nicole (currently #56). (Thankfully newborn Olivia's mother goes by Niki.) That's too popular. My parents didn't know anyone named Nicole when I was born, but they thought the name had a certain something -- and, it turned out, so did many other parents. The name was ranked #108 in 1968, but rose to #47 in 1969, the year I was born -- oh, that darn zeitgeist. (The name went on to be in the top 15 for 24 years starting in 1972.)
These days, however, those who care about over-use have no excuse -- it's easy to find out what baby names are currently popular, and you can even gauge which are rising or falling in popularity. While we were agonizing over Isaac's name I was positively addicted to the Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager as well as to the Social Security Administration's Popular Baby Names page.
I knew what I wanted in a name -- something classic and dignified that sounded intelligent, but with fun nickname possibilities, and that wasn't going to sound outdated or trendy in ten years. I kept saying that I wanted a name that would fit a future Supreme Court Justice (although this is more important for a girl -- Justice Tiffani-Amber just doesn't sound right to me). Although I didn't want a name that was too popular, I wasn't concerned with uniqueness -- I wanted a recognizable name with history rather than a one-of-a-kind creation. Isaac has been ranked about #50 in the U.S. for the past six years, which seemed about the right level of popularity.
The name Isaac is slightly more popular in California, however -- it has been ranked about #30 for the past six years. I wondered if this was too popular. However, although I knew hundreds of small children through my work as a children's librarian, I only knew one Isaac. Where were all the other Isaacs? Perhaps, I thought, the name just isn't popular in the Bay Area where we live, so we're safe. It gave me quite a start, therefore, when a couple we had met in our Berkeley childbirth education class also named their son Isaac -- that's two out of ten couples! And recently I read an article in a parenting magazine written by a San Francisco man in search of the perfect name for his son -- you can guess the punchline. Yep, they named him Isaac.
Please don't tell me it's the zeitgeist.
Edited 2/17/07 to add:
I'm reading Neal Pollack's parenting memoir, Alternadad, and just today I got to the part where his wife suggested they name their son Isaac! Luckily they went for Elijah instead -- somehow I feel that if our kids had the same name, I might also be typecast as a hipster parent. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Edited 2/25/07 to add:
And yesterday I skimmed Peggy Orenstein's infertility memoir, Waiting for Daisy, and it turns out that if she'd had a son instead of a daughter, they would have named him Isaac! She lives in the Bay Area, too.
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