Words Worth Noting - March 7, 2025

“According to Wattenberg [“Laura Wattenberg, author of The Baby Names Wizard and creator of Namerology.com”], Jason barely registered in the 1950s when parents often picked a name following family tradition. If your great-grandfather was named Clarence Leroy, odds were a piece of that name would fall to you. Then came the counterculture movements of the 1960s. For the first time, parents began straying from traditional names. With the guardrails of convention removed, people were free to make up their own minds and forge their own paths. And suddenly, by the 1970s, every other kid was named Jason. Then a funny thing happened: Names started giving way to sounds. Jason begot Mason, Jackson, Grayson, Carson and a whole family of other ‘-son’ names that together make up a major 21st-century trend for baby boys. Nowadays, Wattenberg said, people not only have access to unlimited cable channels and the internet, but those innovations have helped usher in a ‘username creation’ mentality — meaning that if someone else has the same name, it’s viewed as taken. So parents tend to tweak their baby’s name just a bit — keeping the ‘-son,’ for example, while swapping the ‘Ja-’ for ‘Car-.’ Wattenberg finds ‘an incredible irony’ in this. People think they’re choosing something unique, but they do it in a way that winds up moving with the zeitgeist. As a result, names have actually got less distinctive over time, with nearly half of all baby names now following identifiable suffix trends — a phenomenon Wattenberg calls ‘lockstep individualism.’”

Daniel Wolfe in National Post July 22, 2024 [it’s a Washington Post piece and he was expecting a baby boy who was very possibly his first kid since he only just turned his attention to the “trendy baby name trap”].