discuss.

[so-there.livejournal.com]

http://www.livescience.com/37196-politics-baby-names.html

I'm not making sense of it, personally.

Comments

[devonrexlvr.livejournal.com]

I see name choices that support this statement ALL THE TIME "The results revealed that overall, the less educated the parent, the more likely they were to give their child either an uncommon name (meaning fewer than 20 children got the same name that year in California), or a unique name (meaning only one child got that name in 2004 in California). When parents had less than a college education, there were no major ideological differences in naming choice."

[jessicamariek.livejournal.com]

That was the only bit that I really can agree with, too. Without giving away details, I see a lot of dropped-my-Scrabble-tiles names on the, um, less affluent clients of the bank I work at, but the least common name I've seen on a big-bucks account has been Anastasia. *shrug* Anecdata, I know, but it fits.

[devonrexlvr.livejournal.com]

Yes! It will be interesting to see naming trends in a couple generations. I wonder what kids with these "unique" names will do if they go on to become well educated/affluent - will they start naming their children more normal names or continue with their Scrabble tile (I love how you phrase this) names.

[so-there.livejournal.com]

oh, i forgot that was even in there. I was mainly posting for the political stuff.. they're talkig about hard ad soft letters like there are no parents out there who use one on one kid and another on the next kid. and then top-10 names v. uncommon names as if one is more classic and the other more out there (let's not forget Mason and Jayden share the top 10 with names like William and Michael.)

[devonrexlvr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, not sure if I buy the hard/soft letter stuff... I do suppose individuals with more conservative values would tend to go with classic names (and since conservatives more often align with republican ideals they'd infer what they did in the article), and more liberal values would go with less classic names (and blah blah be democrats). But naming is really all over the place these days and I really think socioeconomic status is having a bigger effect than subconscious political alignment.

[roseofjuly.livejournal.com]

Social science statistics look at averages, not individual cases. So while there are certainly conservative parents who use softer letters and liberal parents with kids named Daniel and Bradley, on average it appears that conservatives are more likely to use hard letters and liberals are more likely to use soft letters.

They also commented on how "uncommon" or "unusual" means something different for different SES groups.

[roseofjuly.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I'm very liberal but I favor very conservative names for both boys and girls. I like most of the names in the top 10 (trendy names excluded) and would name my child regardless of it's ranking in the top 10. But it's true that a lot of the boys' names that I like are softer sounds, I suppose (Noah, Elisha, Nathaniel, Isaiah, Isaac, etc.) Same with the girls' names - I like very feminine girls names (Nora, Olivia, Charlotte, Alice).