Baby-name remorse

[glatt]

I understand the desire to name a child something that is not common. With our first child, we went out of our way to find an old family name that wasn't in use much any more. Isabel. Even did research and saw that it was something like number 280 on the list the year before. The Spanish version, Isabella, was a little more popular but was still very rare. When we put her in preschool, there was another Isabel in her class of 15. They even have last names that start with the same letter, so initials for the last names wouldn't work either. Everywhere Isabel goes, it seems like there is another Isabel there. The only name that is more common in Arlington seems to be Emily.

For our son, we didn't try to be different. We named him Adam. There are no other Adams around. The lesson is don't bother trying to be different, just like everyone else.

This is where I usually talk about the name Susan. I think of it as a common name, but it's extremely exotic. There were something like 400 Susans born in the entire US last year.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by glatt

--snip--
This is where I usually talk about the name Susan. I think of it as a common name, but it's extremely exotic. There were something like 400 Susans born in the entire US last year.

your links are not working.

at least not working well... where do you get your "400 susans" information? The baby name gadget I was able to find at the link you offered a ranking of popularity of a given name, not the number of individuals with a given name... unless I'm looking in the wrong place.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by BigV

your links are not working.

at least not working well... where do you get your "400 susans" information?

Can't get anything past you, can I BigV?

Sorry. That first link was broken. I was trying to be all clever by linking the results of a Cellar search where I had mentioned this "Susan" phenomenon in old threads. In a thread back in 2004, I posted that "Susan" had been used 550 times in the previous year. I didn't provide a link then, but a cached google page backs this figure up, especially when you compare it to the figure I gave for Emily in the same post. So I figured that if back in 2003, Susan was the ... crap, now I see that my second link was broken too. Linking to search results doesn't work well.

Well anyway, if you go to http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ and put "Susan" in the "Popularity of a name" search box, you will see that it was number 2 way back in the late 50's and was 511th back in 2003, when there were 550 of them in the country. Last year, it was 611th in popularity. I totally guessed at the 400 number, but figure it is pretty close, because it used to be 550 and has fallen in popularity significantly. Maybe I'm off by 100 or so, but it's got to be in the ballpark.