More baby talk
Mark Maier and Victor Lams have been raving about a handy tool for finding baby names, but in my hardly-ever-humble opinion, the coolest baby-name tool is the Name-O-Meter. It shows the popularity rankings of 4,139 names as they have varied over the past 100 years.
But that's not all: want the latest list of the top 1000 baby names in the US? Here ya go.
Data! I just love data!
As you read down that top-1000 list, you'll notice more and more, ahem, variant spellings. For example, #998 is "Dontae", but that's presumably intended to be pronounced like "Dante". It's a pity we're so libertarian here in America, 'cause I wish we could prevent parents legally from saddling their kids with names that look like typos.
In some countries a little paternalistic restriction is par for the course. A few weeks ago, German authorities forbade a Turkish couple from naming their baby "Osama Bin Laden". Good thing too. Unfortunately, the Kiwis haven't reached that level of progress yet, so their child-welfare advocate can only protest in vain when a child is named after a criminal gang.
A writer down in Tennessee occasionally sends me examples of odd names. Once, she wrote, she met a girl named Dinette. "What's her brother called: Armoire?"
Postscript: A judge in Florida says there actually are some limits on what you can call yourself. Maybe the man involved ran afoul of the "Truth in Advertising" rules when he tried to change his name to "God".
